The Evergreen Excavator | Stonethrow Media
Published: May 2019 Last touched: Never Still Ranking

Your best content already exists. It's just buried.

The Evergreen Excavator shows you how to use Claude to find the posts in your archive worth refreshing, update them honestly, and republish them into demand you've already proven exists. Build it from a one-hour audit all the way to an agent that patrols your archive on schedule. Works with any CMS.

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Field Guide No. 03 Zach O'Brien of Stonethrow Media working through an archive audit at his desk
A decade of archive, excavated on a system instead of a whim.

The system running on Active NorCal's decade-deep archive, where refreshed seasonal posts routinely outperform brand-new stories. From the operators at Stonethrow Media.

What's Inside

Everything between your buried archive and your next traffic win.

No theory. Six working pieces, built from the system running on our own publications.

The Audit

The one-hour dig that turns a Search Console export into your ten best refresh candidates, ranked and ready.

The Rubric

A five-point excavation rubric covering search demand, seasonal timing, accuracy decay, asset strength, and effort, so the dig list picks itself.

The Five Moves

Polish, expand, consolidate, rewrite, or retire. A taxonomy that keeps every refresh honest and every decision fast.

The Calendar

The seasonal calendar template so recurring beats get refreshed thirty days before demand peaks instead of after the wave passes.

The Excavator

The plain-language architecture for a scheduled agent that patrols your archive, flags candidates, and delivers refresh drafts to your CMS with a change log.

The Checklist

A five-minute republish checklist and trust playbook so every new date is earned, disclosed, and defensible.

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How Far You Can Take It

Start with one hour. End with an excavator.

The guide is built as a progression. Stop at whichever stage fits your operation, every level pays for itself.

Stage 01

The dig

One audit prompt turns your top-pages export into a ranked list of refresh candidates. Refresh one this week and watch what an established URL does.

Stage 02

The connected workflow

Your CMS's feed or API puts the whole archive on the table, the rubric scores it, and a seasonal calendar tells you what to dig each month.

Stage 03

The excavator

A scheduled agent inventories, scores, and drafts refreshes with a change log, then queues the republish for your newsletter and social.

Every refresh arrives as a draft with a change log. A human clears every flag before anything republishes. That part is permanent.

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The archive is not your past. Run right, it's your pipeline.
A refresh costs a quarter of a new article and starts from a URL that already ranks

THE FIELD GUIDE SERIES · No. 03 of an ongoing set · Catch up: No. 01, The Press Release Engine and No. 02, The Newsletter Autopilot.

Status: Still Ranking

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