All I can say is never change a pages URL name. AND Never stray away the topic what the page is named. Meaning, keep your keywords in the page if you rewrite it or add more keyword variations by writing more unique content.
point me in the direction of these sites, I'll bet dollars to donuts (what the hell does that even mean) that they're #1 because of authority backlinks.
word. this should definitely be one of the ten SEO commandments. well the reason they still have authority backlinks, despite outdated content, is because they are #1 at google. consequently it's very hard to get past those sites.
I added over 30 new pages for the past month and as soon as they got indexed by google they started appearing in top 10 for their main keywords. The site in question is 3 years old and here is what happened with the new pages: after 2 stable weeks of good SERps, the new pages dissapeared and i found them in the very end of Search results, as a matter of a fact the site itself experienced the same when it was new 3 yaers ago. The rest of the site is doing fine and it has over 2500 indexede pages. So i think it is part of a new google algo - new pages go through a factor of a long aproval time.
One more interesting notice: Those new pages started bringing about 200 extra daily visitors, after they were "dumped" the site didn't lose the daily uniques as it gained visits to the old pages going a bit higher in SRs.
hahaha! man, gotta love that page from 2000. it takes me way back. i think i was using altavista, or was it lycos? maybe go.com or excite, remember that??? and nobody had ever heard of SEO. people were still all excited about "applets". i was driving a lexus es300 and not too worried about climate change. what was my girlfriend's name back then? oh right, i didn't have one. some things never change.
Yes. I've definitely found that they take page age (not just domain age) into account in the SERPS. But it can actually work both ways. Sometimes they'll rank a new blog post really high for a few days when it's first indexed because they think it's "newsworthy" and then they drop it later. So it's a bit more complex than just older is better... But in general, older is better
If I can add some 2 cents to this: page age at the top of the SERPs is most important. Pages who remain at top positions for years means they have gone through several hand reviews and remain clean and in the middle of the road. Of course this is just basic observation and I have no evidence of this because I have a hard time ranking well for basically anything....
i can understand page age. google sees how long a page has been in existance just like domain age. it's like putting up a new page on an old domain. it takes time for google to say it's great and put it on the first page for a keyterm. need to optimize that page too.
Yes, it matters. Had a page created in 1997 just forgotten on a site and found it. It had maybe 3-4 backlinks and has a PR of 4 (domain PR is 6 but there were no internal links to the page, not a single one and no sitemaps). The content on the page hasn't changed since 1997.. So.. yes, if you are patient you can 'grow' your PR sloooowly But I think I'll stick with faster methods..
> All I can say is never change a pages URL name. I don't want to spoil the party but I have to disagree.. My site flippers.be exists now for 3 years.. page names were very cryptic. In april or so I decided to reorganise my site, total new layout and new page names that included keywords. The host I have does not allow 301 redirects (I know I should change one day to another host...) so I just dropped the old pages and put new ones online. Anyway, visitors dropped in the weeks after the new pages went online, but about 2 months later they increased again and my daily visitors are higher then ever before. So renaming url filenames to include keywords were a good thing for my site. I notice certain popular pages before are still popular pages and rank about equally well for certain keywords. My site does only have PR3 so maybe therefor the effect wasn't big.. on a much higher PR site it may cause a bigger drop in serps.
In my experience the 301 is the best method and is very easy to implement. You retain position and the PR seems to get transferred to the new page. It also means people following the outdated links (while you are waiting for the SE's to update their links) will arrive on the new relevant page.
I agree this is best practice but not always practical for say a site which maybe wasn't optimised well previously and you want to make it better. The 301 technique works well enough to ensure you don't lose your SERP listing, visitors and PR whilst the page URL change is being picked up...
Are you sure google just doesn't like to reorganize your pages in it's database when url's change? What if you keep the url, but the content changes slightly? Would it be the same as if you changed the url all together?
hey if i had 2 months (or, who knows, it might be 6, or 8, or 12) i wouldn't be complaining... my landlord doesn't wait 2 months, the electricity company doesn't wait 2 months, the phone company doesn't wait 2 months, and if i had a girlfriend i am sure she wouldn't wait 2 months either i need adsense revenue NOW by the way, i think 2 months is pretty quick, you were lucky. i mean, a sandbox lasts much longer than that.