Eight Year Old Archives and their Use

I finally decided to start sifting through my archives and found that some of them were not that bad, but they had not been enjoyed by anyone much, but how do I promote these older gems in my archives?

For the longest time, I kept hoping that promoting these old chestnuts on my Twitter feed might encourage more interest, but it never really happened (that I can see). I have also tried to create “Best of:” posts where I include the old post and a link back to the old post, but that seemed redundant (and might contravene Google’s rules about duplicate content).

I finally tripped over another use of the Redirection WordPress Plug In, which is to use it for its actual design and point old posts to new posts.

Given I have archives of over 2000 posts, I now have plenty of “content” I can pull from.

Archives Treasure

The methodology is quite simple:

1. Find an old post that I like (that has few or no comments), and note the URL it currently has in the system
2. Go to the “Publish” sub-menu and edit the “PUBLISH” date to be in the future. Doing this changes the post’s URL and status to “Scheduled”. Note the new URL
3. Go to the Redirect plug-in, pop in the old and new URL, and it will set up a “Moved To” Http command

There you have it, what is old becomes new. Most of the time I will at least edit the post and sometimes put a new header block stating that it is an old post with some background, much like I did with: Pension or LIRA? A decision (redux) .

Zombie posts? I guess you can resurrect content.