Content Review Policy
Technical content decays. This page explains how often we re-read what is already published, what triggers an unscheduled review, and when we retire a page instead of patching it.
Why published content needs reviewing
An article about Microsoft 365 licensing is accurate for about as long as the licensing does not change. Security guidance ages faster. A page written in good faith two years ago can be actively misleading today without a word of it having been altered.
The failure mode is quiet: nothing looks broken, the page still ranks, and readers act on advice that has expired.
The review schedule
Content is reviewed on a cycle set by how fast it goes out of date:
- Security guidance and threat-related content — every 6 months
- Product and platform content, such as Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace — every 12 months
- Compliance and regulatory references — every 12 months, and immediately when a regulator changes something
- Service and industry pages — every 12 months
- General guidance with no version-specific detail — every 24 months
What triggers a review outside the cycle
A vendor changing licensing, pricing or a product name. A regulator updating guidance we cite. A significant vulnerability affecting something we recommend. A reader telling us something is wrong. And any occasion where we notice, while doing the actual work, that our own advice no longer matches what we would now do.
What a review actually involves
Someone who does this work re-reads the page against current reality: are the facts still true, are the sources still live and still saying what we said they said, is the advice still what we would give today, and do the links still resolve.
A page that survives unchanged has its review date updated. A page that needs correcting is corrected and re-dated.
The visible "Updated" date on an article only appears when the content genuinely changed — not when a review found nothing to fix. A date that moves for cosmetic reasons teaches readers to ignore it.
When we retire a page
Some content should not be updated. If a page is about a product that no longer exists, or advice that is no longer sound in any form, patching it produces something worse than either deleting it or rewriting it properly.
In that case the page is either rewritten from scratch or removed and redirected to whatever now answers the question. We do not leave outdated technical content published on the grounds that it still gets traffic.