Content Refresh vs New Content: Which Actually Boosts SEO?

Most SEOs have been sold a lie about content freshness 🤔 and I know because I bought it too.

The whole “go update your old posts and watch your traffic climb” thing sounds great in a blog post selling you an audit tool, but the reality of the content refresh vs new content debate is way more complicated than the gurus let on.

I got into this because somebody asked on Reddit, content refresh versus new content: “When traffic dips or stalls, I’m never sure whether to update existing content or just publish something new.” And the answers? 👋 Genuinely fascinating.

There’s a fierce debate happening in the SEO trenches right now and I’m gonna share what the streets are saying, share some stories, and honestly there are major opportunities here to get more traffic if you understand what’s actually going on.

The Reddit Debate That Started This Whole Thing

So the original post was simple: traffic stalled, should I refresh or publish new? And the top comment was pretty standard advice: “publishing new content must be a constant process. Auditing your old content is something that you do regularly, depending on your niche and your available resources. You can go back and check your underperforming blog posts and update them. Start from posts ranking on page two to three in Google.” Fair enough.

Fine. That’s reasonable. And then there was this post I actually made a video about that did really well; people were into this. It said, “please stop publishing new blog posts.” The writer’s argument was dead simple: go to Google Search Console, filter for the last 28 days, export your keyword data, filter keywords in positions three to 20, and then find ways to better optimize for those keywords within your existing content.

Write new sections, add to existing sections, move important content higher on the page, and optimize for snippets.

I love that process. Very easy, very actionable. But here’s where things got interesting: the pushback.

The Freshness Myth Is a “Shill Demand Generation Invention”

One of my favorite SEO redditors, weblinkr, dropped what I think is the most important comment in the entire thread. And I’m going to break down what he said because it changes how you should think about when to update content entirely.

Weblinkr said (basically word for word): “freshness is not something Google looks for, except with query deserves freshness, which is news related. The freshness myth is a shill demand generation invention to create busy work.” Read that again.

He went further: “LLMs do not order fresh either. You can test this by reverse engineering the query fan out and see that they drift with years like 2026, 2024 and 2025. And date searches like this don’t pull content published or updated in this time frame, they pull content matching it, ie 2024 literally needs to appear in the title, H tags, or content, depending on the overall authority of the page.” Huge distinction.

So when someone searches “best SEO tools 2025,” Google isn’t necessarily looking for pages that were updated in 2025. It’s largely looking for pages that have “2025” in the title, headings, or body content.

That means the whole ritual of changing your publish date and swapping a few stats is mostly theater unless you’re actually increasing the page’s relevance to the query.

And look, Google’s documentation on how search works does acknowledge that freshness matters for some queries, but this is tied to the nature of the query itself, not some blanket ranking signal applied to all content. If nobody’s searching for breaking news about your topic, freshness isn’t doing what you think it’s doing. Context matters.

What Actually Moves Rankings: Topical Authority and Internal Linking

Here’s where weblinkr’s comment gets really good and where the real opportunity lives if you’re stuck in the content refresh vs new content loop.

He said: “what will help is to write and rank more posts in the same area and then cross link to those other pages. Pro tip, make those H2s anchor text to double down on the relevance score and create site links, massively increasing your footprint and CTR if you land in positions two through seven.” That’s the play.

So the move isn’t to polish your existing page for the fifteenth time. The move is to publish more content targeting easy keywords in the same topic cluster, rank those pages, and then use strategic internal linking to funnel that authority back to your money pages. You’re building topical authority and becoming more relevant to your niche as a whole.

By ranking for more easy keywords in your niche, you’re also becoming more relevant, which makes it easier to rank for the harder stuff. It compounds over time.

And I have a personal story about this that proves it works. I had a page targeting a very easy keyword, but it didn’t rank. Didn’t rank for years. Over those years I was slowly increasing the topical authority of the site because it was targeting a different niche originally, and I was building it out slowly.

I wasn’t linking to this easy keyword page, wasn’t directing backlinks there, and wasn’t doing much of anything with it really. It just sat there.

Finally I took weblinkr’s tip and just republished the exact same page. Pretty much the same content, the slug was altered by like one word, and the targeting didn’t really change. All of a sudden, with the same exact content, I was ranking number one for the keyword in about two weeks. Then I 301 redirected the old URL to the new one.

The reason? The page had been seen as unrelated for too long before the site’s topical authority caught up. Google had already made up its mind about the old page. The republish forced a re-evaluation with the new authority context. That context shift is what weblinkr was referring to.

The Authority Misconception: There Is No “Page Max”

Another commenter said something like: if you’ve hit a maximum on the pages you currently have, create new content. And weblinkr shut that down immediately: “there is no max on pages. Authority isn’t divided by the pages you have. Authority dies by the link.” That matters.

This is a different concept than most people think about. Your site doesn’t have a page limit where authority gets split evenly like slicing a pizza. Authority gets diluted when it passes through more internal links on a single page; that’s PageRank decay.

So the real issue isn’t how many pages you have, it’s how you’re structuring your internal links and where you’re pointing that link equity.

Growth depends on site structure and link distribution, not on some imaginary ceiling. If your traffic has stalled, the answer probably isn’t “I have too many pages.” It’s more likely that your internal linking architecture needs work or you need more topically relevant pages supporting your key targets. There is no ceiling.

Stop Ignoring Pogo Sticking

Now here’s the thing that most content refresh guides completely ignore, and it’s arguably more important than anything else I’ve talked about so far: SEO pogo sticking.

That’s when somebody clicks your result, doesn’t like what they find, bounces back to the SERPs, and clicks on another result. It’s not about how long you keep somebody on the page; it’s whether they keep looking through the results after they hit your page. If they do, Google notices that behavior pattern.

Google has never officially confirmed using pogo sticking as a direct ranking signal. But Google does hold patents related to user interaction signals, and plenty of experienced SEOs have observed strong correlations between user satisfaction metrics and ranking performance. You can draw your own conclusions there.

At the end of the day, aside from authority, when it comes to a content refresh (and aside from adding more keywords), you want to make sure you have a page where people are not pogo sticking. You want a page title that people want to click. And actually, it’s that simple. Yeah, it’s really that simple.

There’s this story I like to share that was originally shared on the My First Million podcast. This guy was targeting a keyword like “buy gold online,” super competitive, and every three months he’d go back to his page and just think: man, this page really isn’t that great, I can make this a lot better.

He would literally look at what his competitors were doing, take their strengths, apply them to his page, and eventually he ranked number one because he’d built a page that was simply better than everything else out there. Relentless improvement.

What does better mean? Less pogo sticking. Higher click-through rates. That’s the core of it.

My Actual Take on Content Refresh vs New Content

Here’s my take, and I’ll keep it simple: optimize what matters.

If it’s a keyword that you care about, and you are ranking but you’re not ranking number one, do a content refresh. Make sure you have enough internal links directed at the page. If the SERP is competitive with lots of people targeting the keyword, get backlinks to the specific page and direct internal links to that specific page. Focus the signals.

If it’s not a keyword you care about, go after a new keyword that you do care about. Try to make better content. Use the lessons from the previous page (the one that’s not ranking well) and build something that actually ranks number one for the keywords that matter to you and stays there. Pick better bets.

The keywords I go after using my compact keywords method, those pages have been ranking number one since 2019. Well technically it took a few months; you put up the page and they slowly climb to number one, up and down. That’s what happens. So they were really ranking number one in 2020.

Since 2020 they’ve stayed ranking number one. That doesn’t happen from “refreshing” content. That happens from building pages that satisfy intent so completely that nobody pogo sticks away from them. Intent satisfaction wins.

The thing is, if you have a ton of pages that don’t satisfy search intent, publishing lots of new pages that also don’t satisfy search intent (but still target the keywords properly) isn’t the best solution. It might be a quick fix, but the underlying issue is the pages need to prevent pogo sticking and have good click-through rates.

Fix the root cause, not the symptom. Don’t scale bad pages.

Final Thoughts

The whole content refresh vs new content debate is a false binary for most sites. Both have a place, but the order of operations matters.

If you don’t have topical authority, if you haven’t built out enough supporting content in your niche with smart internal linking, no amount of refreshing your existing pages is going to get you where you want to be. Foundation first.

Build the foundation first by publishing targeted content that ranks for easier keywords, cross-link those pages to your money pages, and then use refreshes to fine-tune pages that are close to page one. Sequence matters.

Stop treating your content like it has an expiration date. Start treating it like a network where every new page you publish makes every other page in that cluster stronger. That’s how you build something that ranks for years, not something that needs a “refresh” every quarter just to tread water. Build a network.