Automatic content optimizations

Articles age. Statistics go stale, references drift out of date, and a piece that was accurate when it was written slowly becomes less useful. RankYak counters this with automatic content optimizations: an optimization rewrites a published article with a complete new research pass, records the previous version as a revision you may compare and restore, and, if you allow it, republishes the updated article to your site. This page explains when optimizations happen and how to control them.

When articles are optimized

Your site does one thing a day, and you decide what each day is for: writing a new article, optimizing one you already have, or both. On a day marked for both, the optimization wins when there is an article worth optimizing, and the site writes a new article when there is not. You set this on the calendar.

RankYak picks the article to optimize from your Search Console data: the published page that has lost the most clicks against the period before it, and, where clicks are close, the one that has slipped furthest in position. A site with no Search Console connection has nothing to judge by, so it never optimizes anything and every day it marked for optimization writes instead.

Optimization items appear on the content plan alongside new articles, marked with an optimization badge, so you may always see which article will be updated and when. Only articles that have been published are considered; drafts are left alone.

One caution: an optimization replaces the article's content with the updated version, so any manual edits you have made to that article are overwritten. The edited version is not lost, however; it remains available as a revision, and you may restore it at any time.

Revisions

Every optimization records the article's previous version as a revision. The revision history, available from the article editor, lists each version with when it was recorded and why, such as an optimization or a manual edit. For any revision you may:

• Compare. The Changes view shows exactly what differs between the revision and the current version of the article.
• Preview. The Preview view renders the revision as a full article.
• Restore. Restoring reverts the article to the selected version. The current version is saved as a new revision first, so a restore can always be undone.

Republishing

An optimization updates the article inside RankYak; whether the update reaches your site depends on the Republish updated content setting under Settings, then Automation. When it is enabled, the optimized article is pushed back through your integration as soon as the optimization completes, so the update goes live without any action from you. When it is disabled, the article shows an Unpublished changes badge in the editor, and you may push the update yourself with the Publish changes button. See publishing articles for how publishing works.