Advanced SEO copywriting - Module 6.2 

Dealing with existing content  

Learning objectives 

1. Existing content 

2. Dealing with comments 

3. Content cannibalization 

4. Content maintenance strategy 

Key takeaways 

 

 

Learning objectives 

In this lesson, you’ll learn:  

 

● why you should respond to comments on posts, and how; 

● why content maintenance is important; 

● what content cannibalization is; 

● how to maintain your content by finding outdated content and fixing 

that; 

● how to use the stale cornerstone content function in the Yoast SEO 

plugin. 

 

1. Existing content In this day and age, everything is about the production of content. There’s 

deadline after deadline to reach, endless quotas to fill, and we publish and 

publish and publish. Because that’s how you get clicks and stay relevant in a 

competitive industry. 

 

To offer a fantastic user experience, you have to keep track of your existing 

content, too. You have to interact with your users when they comment on 

your posts. Also, you have to update your outdated articles, to make sure 

that you give users the freshest, most relevant information. Don’t you hate it 

when you’re looking for some info, and you find a seemingly promising 

article, only to find out it was published in 2009? You just wasted your time 

because the content isn't even relevant anymore. This is why content 

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maintenance is essential. 

 

 

2. Dealing with comments Let’s start with something simple: the comments on your posts. Why would 

you react to people who comment? Well, people like it when you interact 

with them. If you respond to comments, people will feel involved and 

become more likely to return to your site.  

 

You don’t have to handle comments immediately. However, it’s considered 

polite to respond in no more than two days. It shows your readers that 

you’re involved. 

 

Generally, we advise people to respond to comments in a patient and 

helpful manner. This builds trust. And, if people are happy with how you 

help them, they might recommend your website or product to friends. 

 

The type of comments you receive on a post may depend on the content you 

create. For example, if you’ve written a politically charged article, there’s 

bound to be people with a different opinion. Or, if you’ve written a how-to on 

the best way to make strawberry jam, people might chime in to add their 

favorite ingredients. 

 

Depending on the type of comment you receive, you will need to give an 

appropriate reply. Generally speaking, we can divide comments into four 

types: 

 

1. positive feedback; 

2. negative feedback; 

3. questions; 

4. spam. 

 

So, let’s see what kind of reply fits them. 

 

Positive feedback 

Everyone likes a compliment. Okay, well, maybe not everyone, but you get 

the point. There’s not much that you can do wrong when responding to 

positive feedback. Simply express gratitude by saying thanks, or invite them 

to read a related post that you know off the top of your head. In Image 1, 

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you can see an example of how one of our co-workers handles some 

positive feedback. 

 

 

Image 1: Hanneke shows appreciation to Salman 

 

Negative feedback 

Negative comments are harder to tackle. Sometimes, people disagree with 

what you wrote. Or maybe they didn’t like your product. Perhaps they just 

woke up on the wrong side of the bed. But, you still have to take these 

comments seriously. Deleting these comments isn’t always the best option, 

because people could interpret that as an attempt to censor them. 

Generally, we advise a patient and helpful approach. Try to find out what’s 

wrong and solve the problem.  

 

If you find yourself in an extended discussion that is getting increasingly 

hostile, stay calm, and empathetic. Keep in mind that it’s not personal. 

Acknowledge the person’s viewpoint and continue trying to solve the issue. 

However, some people can’t be pleased. Be friendly, but firm when you end 

a discussion like this. 

 

In Image 2, you can see an example of how we would deal with a negative 

comment. Image 3 shows an example of a poor response to a negative 

comment. 

 

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Image 2: Jesse responds to an unhappy customer by offering help 

 

 

Image 3: Max responds poorly to a fair complaint. 

 

Questions 

Dealing with questions can be surprisingly hard, especially if you don’t know 

the answer (yet). But it’s rewarding to reply to a question. If you don’t know 

the answer, be truthful about that. People will appreciate your honesty. If 

you don’t know the answer but are committed to helping the reader, you can 

look it up, or provide the reader with a lead. In Image 4, you can see an 

example of a Yoast co-worker dealing with a question on a post. 

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Image 4: Willemien offers advice to help Marcin out with his question 

 

Spam 

Some comments will be utter nonsense or an attempt at getting your 

readers to click on unrelated links. We call this spam. The best way to 

respond to spam is to delete it. You can also get a spam filter to take care of 

this job for you. In WordPress, you can use the default spam filter plugin 

Akismet. 

 

 

3. Content cannibalization Now that we’ve discussed comments, let’s move on to bigger things. 

Remember when we mentioned deadlines and quotas? When a site grows 

larger, there will be more and more posts and articles that need managing. 

Without keeping a solid content inventory, there’s a good chance people 

forget which topics they covered a year ago. So, they end up writing a new 

post about the same thing.  

 

This causes content cannibalization. When a site has posts with the same 

keywords and angle, search engines will get confused about which article 

they should rank higher. For example, if you have an article called “Ten fun 

ways to prepare for Christmas”, and another one called “Christmas 

preparations: ten tips for a jolly holiday!”, the articles are likely to be too 

similar. They’re competing for the same keywords. This might hurt your 

rankings. So, to deal with this, you need to think about content maintenance. 

 

 

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4. Content maintenance strategy Every once in a while, just like a house, a website deserves a good spring 

cleaning. This will prevent content cannibalization. You also have to be 

aware of stale content. If kept unchecked, there’ll be old, irrelevant posts and 

outdated pages. Let’s pick up a broom and deal with all the dusty content. 

But where do you start?  

 

In short, we recommend performing four actions to maintain your content 

and prevent keyword cannibalization: 

 

1. audit; 

2. analyze; 

3. decide; 

4. act. 

 

Now let’s take a look at these steps in more detail. 

 

Audit 

When you make an audit, you essentially examine your existing content. In 

this case, you should check if there is any duplicate content that can cause 

cannibalization. And, don’t forget to look for any stale posts.   

 

Start by thinking about the topics that are the most important on your site. 

For example, if you run a blog about dogs, dog food might be a common 

topic in a bunch of your posts. So, to find these posts, you can search your 

site in Google. You do this by typing in site: [sitename] “[focus

keyword]” in the Google search bar. The search engine then gives you all 

the posts and pages that mention this topic. This means that only some of 

these posts will actually be written around this topic. Others might mention 

it in passing. You can see an example of what a site: search looks like in 

Image 5.  

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Image 5: Audit your site 

 

Before you move on to analyzing, filter the results. Make a list of the articles 

that focus on the topic you are auditing. And, leave out the articles that only 

mention the topic in passing. 

 

Analyze 

Now, let’s move on to the next step. Analyzing the list of posts you’ve found. 

Let’s get cracking on determining how these posts perform. We recommend 

using Google Search Console for this. To use the Google Search Console 

you have to verify domain ownership via a DNS record.  

 

Google Search Console can give you a lot of data, but this is what you’re 

looking for when you enter your focus keyword into the Performance 

section: 

 

1. The popular keywords for your site. 

2. The clicks and click-through rates for these keywords. 

3. A list of pages that receive this traffic and how much traffic each 

page receives.  

 

You find this info by opening up the Google Search Console and choose the 

Performance option under Status in the menu. Then you create a new 

Query filter in the filter bar. Enter your keyword and apply the filter. 

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Image 6: Google Search Console’s Performance option 

 

You can also use the Page filter option. This allows you to filter your content 

by a group of URLs, or a specific URL. This way, you can check each post 

individually. In that way, you can check the traffic that the posts receive 

regardless of the keyword you entered earlier. After all, they might rank well 

on a different query. 

 

Now you know which of your posts perform well and which perform less 

well. This is an important input for the next step. 

 

Decide 

So, you’ve audited and analyzed your site. You’ve got a lot of information on 

the performance of your posts, but now you need to make some decisions. 

How are you going to deal with the posts that need to change? Here are 

three options to ponder over: 

Update 

Updating is your top pick for old, stale content. Update your post to make it 

fresh, relevant, and interesting to your site’s visitors.  

 

You can even republish the updated post. This way, it’ll receive a bump in the 

feed. But beware, republishing is not the same as reposting. Reposting is 

when you post an article again so that there are two versions. You don’t want 

that, because it’ll hurt your search engine ranking. You want to republish, 

which is changing the original article and pressing the “Publish” button in the 

WordPress Editor. We go into more detail on how to republish later in this 

text. 

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Merge 

This is a good solution for content cannibalization. If two articles are too 

similar, you can put them together to make a new, better post. But, merging 

can work for stale content, too. Maybe the post isn’t relevant enough to 

warrant an update. But it does have some interesting bits that are worth 

working into another post.  

 

So, you can merge two or more posts. Always merge posts into the most 

popular one. And, don’t forget to delete and redirect the scrap posts to the 

newly merged article. 

Delete 

Lastly, you can delete a post that you can’t salvage in any way. When you 

delete a post it’s crucial to redirect it to another relevant post. Google 

penalizes undirected URLs because it makes it harder to crawl sites 

efficiently.  

 

Act Now you know which options there are and what they entail. But what do 

you need to do to make your decision work out well? 

Update 

So, how do you go about updating a stale article? First, assess the content of 

the article. Is any of the information you’re giving outdated? Can you think of 

new, fresh examples to explain why your viewpoint is the right one? Can you 

switch out the images for better ones? Then, edit your text and hit “update”! 

 

If you feel like a post could use some extra attention, you might decide to 

republish it. It’s important to note that you shouldn’t just republish any old 

post. Only republish an article if it’s useful and relevant at that point in time. 

 

What does republishing entail in a practical sense? Well, here are four 

actions to take: 

 

1. Edit the article as you would with a regular update. 

 

2. Change the published date in the backend to the current date. You 

do this by navigating the Document section when you’re editing a 

post. Next to Publish, you’ll find a date that you can edit. When you’re 

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done editing the date the article will automatically appear at the top 

of your feed (Image 7). 

 

 

Image 7: Publish date in the WordPress backend. 

 

3. Delete old comments, otherwise, these will reappear. You do this by 

navigating to your posts section in the WordPress backend. Then, 

select the comment icon for the updated page (Image 8). You will 

arrive on a page with the isolated comments for that post. In the 

toolbar, you will have a Bulk Action option. Set this to Move to Trash 

and press Apply (Image 9). 

 

 

 

Image 8: Comments in the post section 

 

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Image 9: Comments on a post 

 

4. This step is optional: include the republished post in your newsletter 

or social media to give it some extra attention. 

 

Merge 

Merging content is even simpler. You want to keep the most popular post. 

Take the relevant content from the stale or cannibalizing post and rework it 

into the popular post. Then, trash the old post and redirect the URL to the 

merged article. How do you properly redirect a deleted post? Let’s talk about 

it. 

Deleting and redirecting 

We mentioned that you should redirect a post when you decide to trash it. 

But how? Well, you can use a 301 redirect message. It’s like a 

change-of-address notification for Google; “You can find what you’re looking 

for over there!”. It tells Google that the page has been permanently moved. 

Alternatively, you can use a 410 redirect message. This will inform Google 

that the post has been permanently deleted. 

 

If you don’t assign a 301 or 410 to a trashed post, you’ll get the dreaded 404 

page not found. This will confuse Google and might damage your rankings. 

 

Luckily, you can easily set up these changes by using the redirect manager 

in our Yoast SEO Premium plugin. If you trash a post you’ll get a popup 

where you can assign a 301 or 410 to it. If you choose 301, you then fill in the 

URL you want to redirect the page to. Lastly, you save the change. Simple as 

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pie! Of course, you can also go to the Redirects menu option for a manual 

approach. 

 

 

Image 10: The Redirects option in Yoast SEO Premium 

 

Stale cornerstone content filter 

We know that content maintenance is a lot of hard work. That’s why we 

created the Stale cornerstone content filter for Yoast SEO Premium. This 

function will track your cornerstone content and give you a warning if you 

haven’t updated it for half a year. If it pops up in this filter, you know that 

you’ve got some updating to do. 

 

 

Image 11: The Stale cornerstone content filter 

 

 

Key takeaways 

• Deal with comments within two days. 

• Respond to comments in a patient and helpful manner. 

• Content cannibalization is when posts compete with each other in search 

engine ranking because they have the same focus keyword. 

• Practice a content maintenance strategy by auditing, analyzing, deciding, 

and acting on potentially stale or cannibalized content. 

• Republish stale posts by editing the post, changing the post date in the 

WordPress backend, and deleting its comments.  

• You can use the Stale cornerstone content filter in our Yoast SEO Premium 

plugin to find important cornerstone posts that need attention. 

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