How do I repost an old post and have the RSS update ? | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

Hi guys,

I reposted an old post for the first time in my blogging history, today. Call it laziness or whatnot but I just didn't have anything ready to go for this week, but at the same time there's a lot of stuff from the first six months that's sitting around in the dusty bin of my archives, so I'd like to clean them up a bit, freshen them up and expose them to the world again.

I heard of the "Old Post Promoter" plugin but that seems to do it automatically. I want to do it manually, so what I did was update the scheduled time of my post. This brought the post to my front page, but there seemed to be a problem with updating the feed in Google Reader. Once a post is in its history, it stays where it is and Reader considers it as an update and not a new post. So, it doesn't show up. I'm not sure if this is an issue with the OPP plugin, too.

How do you guys handle this? I've seen Sam do this from time to time, but I don't remember if it updated in Reader or not.

I tried that once and it screwed up my old link. I set up my site to have year and date on the link so I think that was the problem.

Post edited 6:24 am – June 3, 2011 by Invest It Wisely

"Just edit your post and change the date."

Hey Pinyo,

The issue with that is that it doesn't update in Reader since it still sees it as the same post. I'm wondering if there's a clean way around that problem and what others do.

retireby40 said:

I tried that once and it screwed up my old link. I set up my site to have year and date on the link so I think that was the problem.

Yeah, I read that you can't do this if you have dates in your permalink structure. You could update your permalink structure and make sure you have a rule in your .htaccess to do a permanent redirect on all of the old posts to the new ones. I don't remember the syntax but I've seen some tutorials out there for that; I had to do something similar on a personal blog once.

When I want to highlight old content, I follow the Darren Rowse approach. I find the old post and pull out a paragraph or two that highlights the value of the post. I write a new intro paragraph (prevents duplicate content on the big G) and talk about why it is still relevant, paste the paragraphs in as a quote box, and put a link to the original at the bottom.

That preserves and builds link juice to a quality old post, highlights the content, and gives you an easy blogging day. Win-win-win.

Suba @ Wealth Informatics said:

Kevin, this is what has worked for me (I have been doing this lately too)

Switch it to draft (if google crawls this url at this particular time, it will hit a 404 page)

Change your post (I have been doing some SEO anyway as I didn't have a clue about SEO when I started)

Save the draft (this should change the date, if not, change it manually)

Publish it

Take the old url and redirect it to the new url

This has worked for me very well. The post hits the rss/email and google forwards the old url just fine.

Hmm interesting, so if you do it this way then it will update the feed just fine! From what I read Google Reader uses a unique GUID in the RSS feed, so maybe this forces that value to update. Thanks for sharing this!

Glad I could help. Never copy and paste unless you add something else to create more value. Otherwise, just link back to it.