The Correct Way to Edit a Blog Post: Avoid Search Engine Penalties

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I want to share this quip tip on the correct way to edit a blog post because many bloggers accidentally invite search engines penalties by excessively editing old blog posts. Penalties will put your blog in the dog house, which means less traffic and less revenues for you.  We don’t want that. So while there is nothing wrong with editing an older blog post, the way you do it makes a big difference.

A blogger might edit a blog post previously published for any reason. Two of the common ones that come to mind are search engine optimization (SEO) and content updates.  When I first started blogging, I didn’t pay any attention to blog seo. One hundred posts into the journey I went back and optimized all my posts for search engines.

I have also often gone back to edit a blog post to update the material or content to reflect changes and new developments. Many times links to external web properties go bad for reasons out of my control. Nonetheless, all these changes require going back to edit a blog post previously published.

How to Appropriately Edit a Blog Post

Blogs have an inherent “pinging” functionality built in them.  This functionality allows a blogger to ping or notify various online avenues each time a new blog post is published. When you excessively edit a blog post, you excessively send out pings which can be deemed a spam activity by both search engines and ping engines.

So if you know that you will be going back to edit several blog posts in one sitting, make sure you install the FREE Cbnet Ping Optimizer plugin.  Installing and activating this plugin ensures that ping engines are not notified each time you edit a blog post.

You don’t have to deactivate this plugin to ensure your new posts are pinged.  The plugin prevents excessive pinging activity on older blog posts and shouldn’t affect the new ones you publish. When in doubt, go into the plugin’s settings where you can read about how it works.

Here is how it looks like in your WordPress dashboard.

Never Change the Permalink When Editing a Blog Post

You can change everything when you edit a blog post, from the title to the meta tags and even the entire content if you’d like. However, I would recommend against changing the permalink of the blog post.  The permalink is the blog posts static URL. Here is an example of what one looks like:

http://www.easyextramoneyonline.com/blog/2011/11/best-domain/

Although the permalink is a critical component of search engine optimization in that it should include the main target keyword (in the example above the target keyword is “best domain”), once your blog post is “aged”, it is not advisable to change the permalink for many reasons. One of the main reasons is that there may be several links pointing to that particular blog post, whether from within your blog or from outside resources.

You don’t want to harm the link building potential of your blog post. Many bloggers would argue that it is ok to change the permalink if the blog post is relatively new. Personally, I don’t like to touch it.

Readers: What are some other important things to keep in mind when you edit a blog post? If you have changes planned, use the free Cbnet plugin to edit a blog post.

Sunil
Editing Cleanly

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