Should Bloggers Update Old Posts With New Facts?

Posted on September 1, 2006

Dave Taylor, author of the The Intuitive Life Business Blog, has an interesting post about why he thinks bloggers must be historical revisionists. Taylor uses the example of the JonBenet Ramsey case. Since John Mark Karr is no longer a suspect in the JonBenet Ramsey case, Dave Taylor added an update to one of his earlier posts. Stephen Baker at Blogspotting writes that bloggers don't need to update anymore frequently than newspapers.

Dave Taylor wonders whether bloggers should keep updating their old posts as stories change. His concern: that Web-searchers will come across old blog posts that proved to be incorrect and take them as gospel. I say that bloggers don't need to do that anymore than newspapers do. The value of an old newspaper story is that it gives us a view of how events were being seen that day.

Unless there is an error in the post such as an incorrect fact or a misquote a blogpost doesn't need to be updated months later simply because something new has happened. That's why blog posts are dated. You can just make a new post about the subject and even reference your older post if you want to. There have been times when we made updates to a recently made post. For example, we had several updates to a World Cup post because it had information about the Zidane headbutt and a lot of people were reading that particular post. Another option for keeping readers up-to-date on a particular news item would be to update an older post by adding a link to the more recent post containing the new information. From a traffic mindset that probably isn't a bad idea since any readers looking at your old post would probably be interested in the new updated information.