Links Are Like Last Week’s Fish – They Become Stale
If you have had a website up and running for several years you may wonder why it struggles to rank in search results. It has all the necessary requirements – age, inbound links, content and well optimized pages. What more could it need? Perhaps your links are a little old and outdated.
But links are links, aren’t they? Yes and no. The quantity of relevant high ranking links is important. However, the age of links is also important. Let’s look at two similar pages. Both several years old, both highly relevant to a search phrase, and both with a large number of inbound links. If one of these pages is still attracting links now then its relevance gains a further boost. The other page may not have earned a link for 6-12 months, which may indicate stale content.
So how do you turn that around? There are several approaches you can take. The first is to simply add a blog. By linking to those older pages from your blog you are providing fresh links and implying that this content is still relevant. Add to this social bookmarking and promotion through social networking and you can soon gather some fresh links to this content.
WebProNews has an interesting look at the situation. Search engines are looking at what is happening now. Even something as simple as leaving your comments open on old content could help. New comments indicate that visitors are still participating with the page’s contents.
While ’stale’ links don’t necessarily lose any value, fresh links add to what you have already achieved and signal that a page is still relevant. Search engines are all about relevance now – so prove to them your content is still relevant by finding fresh links.
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