It may not always seem like you against the world, when it comes to promoting your website, but on one level, it is simply a fact. So, how can you breathe new life into old pages and get the most wear from your content? The answer, aged pages and fresh links.
Aged pages have passed the most important factor for present-tense search engine optimization, they have earned a degree of trust and trust rank which can provide tremendous leverage in the SERPs.
What is the first sign? Usually a promotion from the gray bar to some page rank. Although page rank is not indicative of any inherent ranking factor alone, it is a popularity factor that indicates when your content has been indexed, that it is connected to your main navigation or that it is in fact, getting a boost from links (either internally from your site or externally from other sites).
The next stage is, you start to see modest rankings as certain elements and keywords on that page acquire a relative position (nothing phenomenal, but in the 40-50’s in search engines), this is a tell tale sign that your page in question just needs a bit of a boost and is where the next portion of the equation comes into play.
The Value of Teamwork
Just like the buddy system, by teaming your older aged content with freshly created content (with purpose) your site has the ability to punch holes in the inertia and generate an upward velocity that can pull both pages into the top 10.
Fresh content has the ability to bypass many of the formalities and in a way has VIP access to the top 10 if your content is (a) honed & specific (b) has a great title that plays into the main keywords and (c) is interlinked to other pages with authority in the website (pages that rank for more competitive keywords).
Now just like the duo of the wonder twins, each page armed with what the other lacks and united by a common theme can leave your competition reeling as your pages fly by them like a bad episode of the road runner and coyote as you blaze a trail to the top 10.
The formula:
For seasoned types tools are not necessary, almost like being able to interpret code from the matrix, a good SEO can skim and consolidate key factors with ease. For those who may need a bit of guidance, you can use this free tool from Google Rankings to determine the keyword density.
Then after getting the highest ranking phrases sorted on the old / aged page, now is the time to make some last minute adjustments by weeding out any verbose language and adding another instance of the keyword in question. They say two heads are better than one, whereas in this instance two pages are better than one when a keyword conquest is underway.
Then write a new page of fresh content on the subject matter, drop a link to the old page to give it some link juice, do the same by reciprocating the linking between the old page to the new (using the new pages root keywords in the link). This creates a miniature dynamo between the pages that serves to propel both pages (the page with trust & the fresh page with fresh links) to the top of their respective category. The key here is to have a common denominator between the two with some portion of the title, this will create the double listing you see so often in search engines.
This method works particularly well for blogs that are hosted in a sub folder of the main domain name and the other pages are static and aged. There are advantages to being able to mold the flow of authority in your pages using static pages which are off the grid from internal / dynamically linked pages from a content management system like a blog for example.
The combination is a fantastic duo that you can invoke frequently to catapult content that is deserving of praise into the mainstream. In this instance you can give an entire segment of a site a boost by consolidating the two pages towards a less competitive keyword (like low hanging fruit) or team up to chip away at a more competitive keyword. The main asset to observe is that the first page has been indexed and pulling it’s own weight in the search index. Then it is merely a matter of leverage, some creative content and the use of an inherently aging page with trust.
This sounds like a great strategy. Thanks for that. I knew the importance of deep linking but this takes it one step further and allows you to leverage your “old” content.
What do you think of linking keywords that you want to optimize your site for by linking them to your homepage?
Hi Mark:
I have found that if you build enough links to the page, the page pushes the homepage up in the SERPs.
It’s like, when you hit a critical mass for the deep links they transfer it back to the homepage anyway (which is great because you can rank for a term that is not present on the home page) much like the “click here” anchor and Adobe Acrobat.
Never underestimate the power of internal link authority (search algorithms use it to equate trust as well as bolster rankings”).
We are a China tour operator and at the end of each year we’d delete lots of out-of-date content, mainly tour itineraries and associated background info pages. We noticed over the years some of the information pages such as those about Beijing hutong and the Grand Canal of China had very high google rankings when we deleted them. In hindsight, that was a huge mistake and we’d never do that again. The popularity of those pages have a lot to do with links from quality websites such as universities. Since we kept deleting or moving around those useful pages, those folks probably got tired and removed the links to us.
Thank you for the tip. We’ll take it to heart.