By: Ryan Walsh

Date: 11 May 2026

About the author:

Ryan Walsh is a Cardiff based SEO consultant. He has run the agency Walsh & Partners for over 10 years. We specialise in SEO, GEO and also Local SEO services. Ryan is a keen runner, enjoys the gym and is keen on helping businesses to expand.

 

Table of contents:

• What exactly is content decay?
• What causes content decay to occur?
• Why keeping your businesses content marketing up to date is key
• We offer recommendations on how to fix decaying content marketing

 

Introduction

It’s important to note that all content marketing has a limited life span.

It could be a winning piece of content that shoots straight to the top of Google’s results.

However, it only going to be ranked say in the top organic results, when the answer is deemed the most relevant and up to date.

Therefore, content marketing needs to be updated.

What causes Google rankings to move around?

You might be wondering why would Google move a business to the top of results, only to move it down the results at a later date.

The answer is simple; the competitors are always looking to improve.

If they simply write a better piece, which earns more authority, through having earned more backlinks that piece will simply outrank the content marketing ranked number one.

 

What does content decay mean?

Content decay often doesn’t mean that the organic traffic to pages and blog posts falls off a cliff.

Often instead the organic traffic declines slowly over time. This means that the ranking will decrease over time.

Sometimes occasionally a more sudden drop will occur, this is normally swiftly followed after a Google update. The website can also be totally de-indexed; this is sometimes due to a Google penalty. For example, if a website had say a lot of duplicated content, or spun content, then this can trigger penalties. This is when the business would be completely removed from the index, which is referred to as being deindexed.

But what are the actual causes of content decay?

Google’s query deserves freshness.

For a long time, good marketing consultants will know that Google prefers to offer a more up to date answer.

Now, the page must still have a really good Google EEAT score. That is the page needs to demonstrate that you have strong experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness in terms of what you are writing about. However, the answer to that query can simply become outdated.

As Googlebot keeps crawling that work, it will know that it’s an answer that the business has written a long time ago.

Therefore, if somebodies looking for an up-to-date answer, such as the best products on sale that year, well that page written a long time ago is not going to be relevant. This is why how fresh, or how up to date that answer is, so vitally important.

This is why; Google and marketing consultants have used the description that the query does demand freshness.

 

Competitor improvement

What’s important to understand is that even the companies blog posts are competing with potentially hundreds or thousands of other businesses for organic visitors.

Therefore, its not just your main keywords, which describe the businesses main services or products that you want to be ranked high in Google’s SERPs for.

Also, its often hundreds of frequently asked questions which relate to your business.

Therefore, businesses understand that these questions are asked before the customer takes action to buy an item.

Often referred to as the buying cycle, or the marketing funnel.

Therefore, let’s give a brief example, somebody looking to purchase an engagement ring for the first time may not know about the different clarity and quality of the diamonds. Therefore, as you would imagine businesses that operate in this business sector will want to publish helpful content marketing which answers these questions that shoppers have as they are about to embark on the buying journey.

Then when you answer these queries a really helpful and engaging way, you build trust with the customer. For example, an informative piece of content marketing, which a presenter presenting advice via an embedded YouTube channel, helping and guiding the customer into making the right purchase for them, this work will rank high on Google.

The point we are making here is a simple one, businesses in the same business sector are constantly competing for keyword positions for their main products and services. However, they are also often competing for those much longer tail keywords that help to bring in relevant traffic from Google.

Being ranked number one on Google doesn’t mean it will stay that way

Internal keyword cannibalisation

This is a really important point, that is sometimes businesses make the mistake of publishing multiple pages which compete for the same keyword.

The mistake that so many businesses make is thinking that if they write say multiple blog posts, all about the same thing, they will rank higher for that keyword. However, it creates what is called “keyword cannibalisation”.
Now this does sound super complicated, however, its simply not. What it means is say that you want your e-commerce business to rank for “copper bath tubs”.

However, if you have multiple pages all with have H1,H6 tags, and meta descriptions for example, trying to target that keyword, you are creating keyword cannibalisation issues.

Therefore, when you talk to SEO gurus such as us, we would need to come with a marketing strategy so that those pages are not competing with each other. That its clear as day which is the main page, the main landing page for that keyword.

Now for that to happen, perhaps, sometimes its best to use permanent redirect. This is called a 301 redirect.

However, a good seo expert would need to see which is the best way to solve your businesses keyword cannibalisation issues.

A size fits all approach does not work, an expert would need to calculate which is the strongest page, which has the best link equity leading to it. Then sometimes, its best to redirect the link equity to that main page.

 

Old outdated statistics and data

If you have a lot of articles, which once ranked high in Google’s organic SERP’s, yet the organic traffic has declined, this could be because of using old statistics.

For example, if you are quoting market research data from many years ago, this is a clear signal to Google that the page is outdated.

Therefore, this brings us back to our previous point about the “query deserves freshness”. What we mean by that is, it’s far better to keep the page up to date, if similar market research or data is published, make sure that you update the page with this relevant and more up to date data.

 

Could the page just need the on-page signals improving?

Sometimes you might have a page which is evergreen.

This means that the information doesn’t need to be constantly revisited and updated.
Sometimes therefore with some on-page SEO improvements, you could start to move up Google’s ranks. It could have been the case that the actual advice, the text is the best answer there is.

However, if the on-page signals are not that clear, in that the H1 titles, through the meta descriptions are not that well optimised, then this can mean that Google’s algorithms can sometimes struggle to understand what the page is about.

So therefore, sometimes the answers that rank number 1 or say occupy the second of third position in Google’s SERP’s are not sometimes the best answer. However, sometimes they just get the on-page signals right, so that they are deemed more relevant.

Therefore, if you have a better answer, say written in a piece of evergreen content marketing, sometimes it’s just a matter of improving the on-page signals.

 

A word on AI

It’s widely thought that the AI platforms, such as Perplexity and say ChatGPT prefer to quote and cite much more up to date information.
So, when we mentioned that Google’s organic algorithms used the principle of the query deserves freshness, well this is amplified and even more so when we discuss AI.

So, for those businesses which are interested in GEO and being displayed as say a Google AI Overview answer, it’s even more important that the content marketing is kept up to date as far is reasonably possible.

Giving the content marketing a new lease of life

Often when we have been super busy, say writing a long article, often businesses then promote the work via social media.

Often there’s a few posts on say LinkedIn to promote the work.

What you could do to improve your marketing strategy is, you could update the content marketing, by rewriting areas that need updating.

Then after that, you could then further promote the work on your business’s social media accounts.

Therefore, the point that we are making here is simple, often a lot of businesses only promote the work on their social media accounts, such as on LinkedIn when they have just finished writing the work.

However, when you have updated the work, that’s also a great opportunity to further promote the page on your business’s social media accounts.

 

Content marketing audits

Therefore, you know when you go on various company websites blog posts, often they have a date for when the article first went live.

However, then sometimes below it will be a mention of when the work was then last updated by say a copywriter.

The reason that businesses simply do this is because they understand content decay.

They know that if they just keep busy writing endless blog posts that the information, unless kept updated will eventually become irrelevant.

When it comes outdated and irrelevant this is when Googles algorithm will then move that particular page or blog post down the ranks.

Therefore, companies which are really good at improving their search engine optimisation will know that they need to regularly revisit and update their work.

A lot of businesses refer to this as a content marketing audit, this means routinely revisiting the work, and seeing if there are any opportunities perhaps to further improve and update the work.

 

Frequently asked questions:

Does content decay impact all pages and blog posts?

This does depend on whether the page is offering advice which would alter and change in time.
For example, obviously a page which describes the most popular electric cars for a particular year would eventually get outdated.

However, another page, offering advice on how to best care for a Rolex watch, well perhaps that page is more evergreen and therefore doesn’t need updating as often.

 

What impact does content decay have on my businesses content marketing?

What can happen is that the organic traffic can decline over time.

This often happens because other businesses are answering that exact question when writing their own content marketing.

However, the difference is, there answer is more up to date.

Therefore, throughout this whole article, we were talking about “the query deserves freshness”- now what we mean by this is simple, the way that Googles algorithm works is that they prefer to cite more up to date answers.

This is why a business should keep their content marketing up to date.

 

About the author:

Ryan Walsh is one of the most experienced SEO gurus in the whole country.

He owns and manages Walsh & Partners. We specialise in working with businesses that operate in highly competitive business sectors. For example, we work with leading lawyers.

We are leaders in offering link building and e-commerce SEO.

Talk to us today, we offer free and no obligation quotes.