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Comment by paulryanrogers | Hacker News Reader

> Keep editing older posts so they always stay up to date.

Sounds like a bit of a rat race compared to just writing more timeless articles, or just leaving dated topics for reference.

While newness may be a great metric for Google I'm not so sure it creates the best incentives for building an Internet full of useful, quality content.

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Not everything can be "timeless". Plenty of content is about the state of X at time Y. Things change and if your article is good and getting a long-tail of visitors, it's in your best interests to keep it updated with changes, or at the very least add a note to where newer information can be found.

The metric isn't exactly "newness" but relevance.

Timeless or "evergreen" content doesn't have to be updated. It's alright to keep them as is.

But keeping obsolete content online is a pain in the ass for users, so they will increase your bounce rate. Either update them or show a big notice on the top with a link to a newer article. Google will hopefully pick them up and the internet wins.

That's a somewhat odd thing to say. StackOverflow would be better off not leaving dated topics for reference (as you can see when someone leaves a comment about how they wish the highest voted answer was actually up to date with the latest changes in that technology), and aspiring to be the StackOverflow of your niche is actually not such a bad idea (in the sense that they do allow and encourage updates to the answers). Besides, in some domains which overlap heavily with technology (e.g. marketing automation), writing timeless articles is pretty hard. Lastly, updating genuinely out of date content is a big favor for your readers and one that they will appreciate, even if your overall view is simply "Fk Google!".

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