I’m going to skip the intro where I tell you SEO is changing or that AI is killing search or whatever. You know the discourse. What I want to do here is share three things I actually did to my own site in 2025 that moved the numbers, with rough percentages and the boring details. None of these are clever. All of them took work. Honestly the most surprising part for me was how much of the gain came from things I’d been putting off because they felt like janitorial work, not content work.

The headline number, since I know that’s why anyone clicks on these posts: organic traffic on pivotlog.net went up about 38% from late June to late October 2025. From around 11,400 monthly organic clicks (Search Console, not Analytics) to around 15,800. Not life-changing. Not a screenshot for LinkedIn. But for a blog I’ve been running on and off since 2002 with no schedule and no guest posting strategy, I’ll take it.

1. Updating old posts instead of always writing new ones

This is the one that surprised me most. For most of my blogging life, my answer to “the site needs more traffic” has been “write more posts”. Push out new stuff. Cover new topics. Rinse, repeat.

Sometime around April I sat down with Search Console and just sorted my pages by impressions. Not clicks, impressions. The pages that Google was already showing to a lot of people, but that weren’t pulling much traffic. There were maybe twenty of them, mostly old posts from 2018-2022 that had drifted to position 8-15 for a bunch of related queries. They were ranking. They just weren’t ranking well enough to be clicked.

So instead of writing new posts that month, I picked the top ten of those and added 200-300 words to each. Not a rewrite. An addition. Usually a new section that addressed a related sub-question that the post hadn’t covered, plus a small refresh of any genuinely outdated facts (a tool name that had changed, a price that was wrong, a screenshot from 2019). Then I bumped the published date to the current month, which I know some SEO people argue about, but on my site it’s accurate – I genuinely did update the content meaningfully.

The lift on those ten posts was something like 60% more clicks within about eight weeks. A few of them moved from page two to position 4 or 5. One that had been sitting at position 11 for two years jumped to position 3. I didn’t change anchor text on it, didn’t build any links, didn’t do anything except add a 250-word section answering “how does this compare to X” which was clearly a related search.

The lesson, for me at least: Google already knows about your old posts. If they’re ranking on page two, the page is fine, the content just needs more meat. Adding to existing pages is way more efficient than starting from zero.

2. Fixing internal-link anchor text so it reads like prose

This one I’d been putting off for years. I had a habit, going way back, of internal-linking with exact-match anchor text. “Best PHP hosting” linking to my best PHP hosting post. “Image tools for blogs” linking to my image tools post. Looks tidy, very 2012, and I’m fairly convinced it now slightly hurts more than it helps.

I went through about 60 posts (I have a script that pulls every internal link on the site into a CSV with the anchor text) and rewrote the surrounding sentences so the link sat inside natural prose. So instead of “Check out our best PHP hosting guide” I’d write “I went deeper into this in a piece about which hosts I’ve actually used” or just have the link be a few words mid-sentence. The anchor still mentions the topic. It just isn’t the title of the post copy-pasted.

I cannot prove this one with certainty because I did it across the same window as the post-update work. But the pages I’d updated and re-linked with naturalised anchors did better than the ones I’d only updated. My gut says this matters more than people give it credit for, and the cost is just an afternoon of careful editing.

3. Culling the thin posts

This was the painful one. I had something like 340 posts on the site at the start of 2025. A lot of them were old short posts from when I treated this thing like Twitter – 200 words, three links, a quick observation. They were not the kind of content anyone was searching for, but they existed, they were indexed, and they were dragging the site’s overall quality average down.

I went through and pulled every post under 400 words. There were 71 of them. Then I made a decision about each:

• If the post had any organic traffic at all in the last 12 months, I expanded it (same 200-300 word treatment as above).
• If it had a topic worth keeping but no traffic, I merged it into a related longer post and 301-redirected.
• If it was just a 2009 post about a band I liked, I deleted it and let it 410.

Net result: I lost 43 posts entirely, merged 12, expanded 16. The site dropped from 340 to about 285 indexed pages. And in the three months after, the remaining pages – including ones I hadn’t touched at all – started ranking better. I think this is the “site quality” thing people talk about. You can’t easily measure it, but you can feel it when it shifts.

This is the one I’d been most resistant to. Deleting your own writing feels like undoing work. But a 2011 post that says “just heard about this thing called Bootstrap, weird name” is not pulling its weight, and if anything it’s signalling to Google that this site has a lot of low-effort pages. Letting it go is fine.

What didn’t work

For balance: things I tried in the same window that did nothing measurable. Updating meta descriptions site-wide. Adding FAQ schema to a bunch of posts. Submitting an updated sitemap (it was already auto-submitting). Writing two long pillar posts targeting big head terms – both still sitting around position 30, which is exactly where new posts on a small site usually sit, no matter how good they are. Patience required.

I’m aware that 38% over four months is not a magic number, and I’m aware that the next four months might give it all back, because that’s how this works. I’m also aware that my numbers are tiny compared to anyone running this as a business. But if you’ve been pushing new content uphill and not updating the existing stuff, the order of operations might be the lesson here. Old posts first. New posts second. And cull the dead weight before you do anything else.