Headsmacking Tip #11 - Refresh Legacy Content for a Rankings Boost

SEO digest

This week's headsmacking tip is extremely powerful and pretty darn simple to implement. The premise is straightforward - you've got old content that ranks in the top 20-30 results, but never achieves first page (or top 5) rankings. Frequently, we see a lot of sites making the mistake of trying to link build (both internally and externally) to the old content:

There are some specific strategies that are excellent for refreshing content and continuing to earn links to a URL:

• Have an old blog post? Spruce it up with new material, some spiffy graphics and re-release with a promotional push.
• Got a contest? Re-run it annualy and continue to garner links to the URL again and again.
• Built a smart how-to article? Re-engineer it with the latest data and go for a new viral campaign.
• Old sales page that lacks anything interesting? Do what these guys do and make a new version.

Added bonus - when you refresh a page, you might find that you have trouble submitting it to the major social marketing services. Use the # operator (which the engines ignore) or a ? operator in the URL that 301s and you'll be fine. You can also take the old content and, if desired, move it to a new URL (using our example above, something like domain.com/tubas/2001/ would work) so it stays in your archive and can still be accessed by those who are interested.

Give this headsmacker a try on some pages that you're having an especially hard time ranking. The combination of old links + new can be a great way to win an otherwise very challenging battle in the SERPs.

www.seomoz.org

published @ January 20, 2009