now everyone in SEO knows that, if you want to rank well in the serps, the age of a domain name is important. so we register domain names in advance and put up preparatory content, or we buy old domains that have been in existence for a long time. but lately i have discovered a similar factor which i wasn't aware of, namely page age - as opposed to domain age. how i discovered this: to take advantage of geotargetting, i recently reorganized my site. this involved changing the URL's of a large number of pages, which had been in existence about a year. i dropped like a stone! after reindexing, i am not doing half as well in the serps as i used to. moreover, i now realize, it is those sections of my site which were released first that have always done better in the serps - the older the section, the better it does in the serps. and this has nothing to do with indexing, nor backlinks, because the number of backlinks to my longtail pages is, and always has been, negligible. so what i find is this: all other factors being equal, it is those pages which have been in existence longer that will do far better in the serps. pretty obvious and typical of google, if you come to think of it, but it is rarely mentioned - i have never heard anyone mention it - so i decided to post about it. conclusion: do not change the URLs of a large number of pages that are important to you if you can at all avoid it.
Interesting, never really thought about page age either, but it does make sense. Gonna do some tests myself as well!
Come to think of it, I already did this in the past... This is the same problem as many people have with 301'ing their pages if they restructure their site. Did you use permanent redirects or not any redirects at all?
good point, redirects. i didn't bother because i have pyramidical PR. all my PR comes in via my front page and filters through to the rest of the site. i have a negligible number of deep links into my site. so my PR (real PR as opposed to toolbar PR) now should be the same throughout my site as it was before. since redirecting is about maintaining PR of existing pages, i.e. not wasting backlinks, i figured that there is no need for redirects. all my pages are linked from the front page of my site exactly as before, except that the URL is slightly different.
Yes, page age seems to be fairly important. There are a great many ranking factors that are rarely discussed anymore, but here's a good summary of the most important factors: Ranking Factors /*tom*/
thanks for the link. i see they call it "document age". nice little manifesto. there's some bullsh*t on there too, but at least they have a consensus/controversy rating.
Sorry, but your claim makes no logical sense whatsoever. The very nature of the web is dynamic, that means that data and information is constantly on the move so to reward a static page more than a dynamic one does not make sense. I believe this does not hold truth from experience, as I completely redesign websites every single day, and the contrary happens, my rankings get better not worse. If you properly redirect your old pages, you will have no problems. You might temporarily loose your ranking for a while until the algo picks up the changes, but if you have no changes in your backlinks you should have no problems get back to where you where. Things you can do while you are doing a redesign and improve your rankings? CLEAN CODE! Bot LOVE clean code and your site will be indexed faster and better. Proper use of markyo, H1, H2, LI, B will do wonders for onpage optimization.
Perfectly logical what you are saying, i am constantly seeing on here problems with people with new site trying to get better SERP's that older sites that now have old, out of date information. even though the site have fresh, new content, they still cant beat older more established domains.
I think that you may be partly correct, and partly wrong. Either way, I have avoiding renaming many of my pages, just because they are "etched" into the record of the internet - bookmarks, forums, etc.. Some of my URLs have hyphens, and I'd prefer underscores instead. But I continue to leave the URLs as-is. Recycling an old URL is handy too. I used to use my "landscaping.shtml" page for just my landscaping service. Instead of deleting the page when it's use expired, I utilized the page URL for my index list of several services. Especially since "landscaping" is a good word to have in the URL. As far as page-age, I have not been able to verify for certain that old age is as beneficial as it is for domain age. For absolute certain, I've seen domain age help.
It might be a factor, but google seems to be pretty forgiving. I made some major changes to my busiest site about 8 months ago. It was a PR3 site, and #4 on SERP for it's keyword. The domain had been around for 6 years, and the current site config had been in place for about 4 years. I moved to a wiki & new forum software and completely abondon the old software. It took about a week, and I made a bunch of redirects for specific pages, but it went up to a PR 5 and #2 on the SERP for the main keyword, and has been there since. Presumably, it page age had been a major factor, my site should have dropped on the SERP. I definitely see that domain age is important to google, and that makes a lot of sense. The very thing google is trying to combat are spam sites popping up like weeds. A site that's been around for a while is both likely to have lots of backlinks and indexed content, but also is more trustworthy (assuming it was trustworthy in the past). I'm probably not going to take my pr 5 site and turn it into a big ad laden keyword spam site after so many years. Conversely, sites are changing software and reorganizing their sites all the time. So, penalizing that kind of thing is done at the exepnse of potential quality results.
Yes page age is important. I have old pages that rank better than new pages, even though both may have the same amount of pr and links.
I think you should make 301 redirects. I had experience in doing this in some of my sites and not losing positions in SERPS. It can be hard work if you have many pages but its worth the effort.
I think while domain age is important, page age is not. It's only the matter of backlinks (you cannot be sure that a page has no back links only because you don't know them!) if you 301 redirect old pages correctly, new pages will get the same old PR and will rise with time. The drop is only temporary until SE update their indexes. This is what happened to me, I didn't lose PR when I renamed my old pages and 301 redirect to the new ones.
i actually agree with this. but it happens to be what google are doing. it doesn't make much sense to me to reward old domains, either.
yeah, so true. i really struggled with this when i released a city guide in 2005. it had the best and most complete information, but it did badly in the serps even after SEO. now it's 2007, my city guide's information is way out of date, and it's doing well in the serps, hehehe. oh well.
no, no, it's not about PR. this has nothing to do with PR. my pages currently have the same PR (real not toolbar) as before. they are all indexed - in fact I have more pages indexed now than before. (and of course the way i check indexing is by looking just for pages not in the supplemental results, using the asterisk like so .) i do not have any incoming links to my static pages (in fact, i do not have any natural incoming links). plus, the linking structure is exactly the same. the URLs of my static pages is exactly the same as before, except for the subdomain. so it can't have anything to do with PR... unless there is no difference between toolbar and real PR, and nobody believes that anymore. really, folks, what i discovered is that page age is very significant, the difference between the way new and old pages rank is huge. it's not a minor factor, at least not for me.
I have had the same experience more than once, with Google, msn, yahoo 301 redirects are absolutely necessary I see many reasonable points in this thread , but the facts about what happened are clear
I experienced exactly the same thing menosodium is explaining. I changed the site, changed the internal urls (better for SEO purposes) & traffic halved. After one year it is almost where it was before changes. I didn't do any 301 redirects & have learned the hard way I should do it next time.
page age is a pretty elementary thing. That's why there are so many truly crappy sites with 15 pt Times New Roman fonts from the 90's that are still on the front page of Google. My company has no chance of ever ranking on page 2 for our market because of it (thankfully, the competition can't do it either).