content-refreshlisted

# Content Refresh and Decay Recovery On any site with more than fifty published pages, updating what exists usually returns more than publishing something new. The page already has links, history and index presence. You're moving it from position 11 to position 4, not from nothing to something. The hard part isn't the rewriting. It's picking the right pages and correctly diagnosing why each one fell. ## Step 1: Find the candidates Four queries against Search Console, in order of return. **Striking distance.** Pages averaging position 5 to 20 with meaningful impressions. These have already been judged relevant and are one improvement away from real traffic. Highest return on the list. **Decayed.** Compare the last 90 days against the same period a year ago. Sort by clicks lost. A page that fell from 900 clicks to 200 is telling you something specific. **High impressions, low CTR.** The page ranks but nobody clicks. Often this is a title and description problem, not a content problem, and it's a 20-minute fix. Check the SERP first, because sometimes the answer is that an AI Overview now sits above the result and the clicks aren't coming back. **Zero-click pages.** Indexed, no impressions, no clicks, no links. These are pruning candidates, not refresh candidates. Sort every candidate by clicks lost times commercial value. Work down that list. ## Step 2: Diagnose before rewriting Rewriting a page that fell for a technical reason wastes a day. Work through these in orde