A fundamental problem with the design of most blogs is that they are chronological and now-oriented. Once a post falls off the front page, we tend to forget it was ever there, and, indeed, it can be difficult to locate an old post on a blog even when you know it's there and are looking for it.
However, for Google, a blog post is forever. If you delve into your blog stats (as I have, for some of you), you might be surprised to find that some of your most popular blog posts are older ones.
The good news is that those posts are still considered useful and relevant and are bringing in traffic. But that could be bad news if their information has been superseded or annulled by more recent developments. It may be worth taking a look at your popular older posts to see what needs a refresher.
Another problem with blog design is that, even if you later posted something expanding or correcting or updating an older post, a visitor who arrives at your site via a search may never see the newer information. Only someone who has been following your blog faithfully day by day would know that something more has been said on the topic, and it's clear from the blog stats that that's not where most of your traffic is coming from.
So, where newer information exists, please take a minute to edit the older post with a pointer to the newer one. This helps to ensure that the information our community is getting from us is always as complete and up-to-date as we can make it.
For those on the Solaris Storage Blogslist, I have set up an Omniture report that will be emailed to each of you (and me) on the 7th of every month, showing the ranking of the most popular pages on your blog for the previous six months. This can help you determine what most urgently needs to be updated (if anything), as well as what kinds of topics are proving most useful to your readers.
If anyone else reading this would like to receive such a report for their blog, feel free to ask - it takes about two minutes for me to set this up in Omniture, after that it will keep going out automatically every month.
If anyone would like consultation on their stats, or more detailed or other kinds of stats, feel free to ask about that as well.
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