My business partner and I are looking to take some time off this summer. With that in mind, we thought we could lessen our workload by republishing some of our favorite articles (and mixing the whole with one or two new posts a week instead of 5). I am wondering what best practices would be to get this accomplished without upsetting Google or our readers. 

In Wordpress, it seems that changing the date of the post will republish it at the scheduled date in the future. The problem with that is that scheduling can’t be done in advance without temporary removing the post until it is set to be (re)published again. Obviously, this process removes the threat of duplicate content (Google friendly), but does not offer the convenience of scheduling in advance – unless I’m ok with the posts set to be republished are temporarily suspended in the publish queue.

Any ideas, recommendations, stories of how you might have handled this?

Many thanks! 

As Kristi said, I’d rather see new content than simply republishing old stuff.  If that isn’t possible then I’d rather see a ‘on holiday’ sign put up, and you can then use Twitter etc. to direct people to older content.

Thanks all. Good tips indeed. Still mulling over how we will proceed. 

One thing to consider, if SEO is a concern: republished content will be caught as duplicate and may affect your ranking.

Kristi’s suggestion is a good one … but why not write a short intro to your most popular posts, then LINK to them (instead of copying and re-posting), then schedule them for publication?

That will build link-juice and help SEO. It may even be more pleasing to your readers.

@adigaskell great tip that one.  @anne-mariekovacs If you are trying to get people to look at hold posts that you feel didnt really get the traffic or exposure it deserved, then try make new posts that revolve around your old post and direct people back to it. i have seen this work really well