Article size, duplicate content, repurposing old articles

Hi,

I have a blog that I created about 6 years ago. I haven’t done much with it since, but am going to crank it up again.

I had about 50 really high quality articles, each made up of several key segments.
So, I broke them down into 5 x 400 to 700 word articles. Posted them and then didn’t do much more.

I hear that these days, it’s better to have longer articles.

I was wondering:

1. Is it best to join them back together (to i.e. 3000 words on average) and post them again.

2. If so, should I remove the shorter versions, or is it ok to have the 1 big one + the 5 smaller ones (or is this duplicate)

3. Is it best to leave the smaller ones because they’ve been on there for so long (does google like the fact they’ve been there for 6 years?). (All in all, the site is getting about 250 visitors a month total from the articles. So not much, but something)

4. If I change them into the longer articles, should I do some sort of redirects from the old articles to new ones to let google know

Thanks for any ideas / advice, etc

 

Hey, I had a blog in niche years ago. (niche withheld)
I wrote a 200 some word article.
It was super targeted and the keywords that I inadvertently targeted made me like a grand in less than a week.
I guess what I am trying to say is that as long as the CONTENT itself is relevant, everything else should just fall into place.

Personally everyone is so hell bent on how many words there are and trying to(and thinking they can) somehow screw Google that they don't bother giving the reader what they were after to begin with.
Every blog post and article I write is in my honest style.
(even the ones I re-write and sell below....shameless plug)

 

p.s. Don't mess with the old articles. Write newer ones that link back to the old ones.

 

I agree with DaveP. "Be original in what you write" is important. Everything else is not from this world.

 

Yup! Totally agree with DaveP. But can I ask that If we link back to the old one. Will we keep the content? Or we should find something relevant and new?

 

Google might see it as a copied content, this is because the old articles might probably have been indexed already, so by the time you redo them again, when google tries to check the new version, the bots will see that those articles have already been indexed as so this new version is probably from a 'copy and paste' blogger. this will mean bad business for an article you are hoping you did better work on.

Wishing you the best!

 

Making old articles "fresh" and "relevant" is a great strategy. Content can become stale after awhile.