What it is.
You confirm intent against the current results page, read 6 to 12 months of traffic and click-through rate, check for cannibalization, update titles and headings, refresh stale facts, strengthen internal links, add schema and extractable answers, review the call to action, then republish with a change log.
Every candidate page gets scored 1 to 5 on business value, decay severity, ranking opportunity, refresh effort, and AI visibility opportunity. The total decides what you touch first.
Review frequency is set by content type: top-of-funnel posts every 6 to 12 months, comparison pages every 3 to 6, glossary entries yearly, and product pages on release. This is Slate's own guide.
What you get.
- Nine refresh steps in a set order.
- A five-dimension scoring model on a 1 to 5 scale for choosing pages.
- Review intervals by content type, from 3 to 6 months for comparison pages up to yearly for glossaries.
- A 7/30/90 day measurement window with what to look at on each date.
- A change log habit, so the next person knows what was already tried.
How to set it up.
Pull the pages that lost clicks over the last 6 to 12 months from Search Console, and ignore anything that never had traffic.
Score each candidate from 1 to 5 on business value, decay severity, ranking opportunity, effort, and AI visibility opportunity.
Check the live results page for your target query before rewriting, since changed intent means a new page.
Look for cannibalization first, because two pages splitting one query needs a merge, which is a different job.
Update the title, headings, and stale statistics, then add an extractable answer block and FAQ schema.
Republish with a dated change log, then read results at 7, 30, and 90 days without touching the page in between.
Use cases
Choose which pages to refresh
Score candidates on the five dimensions and take the top of the list.
Work the steps in order
Follow the nine steps so nothing gets skipped on a busy week.
Check the result on schedule
Read the page again at each of the checklist's review points.
Best for
A library that stopped growing
Publishing more while the existing pages decay is the expensive answer.
Deciding what to leave alone
The scoring model gives you a reason to skip a page that survives a review meeting.
Setting a maintenance rhythm
Review intervals by content type turn refreshing into a calendar entry.