Written by james | 08 February 2010
Posted in S.E.O

Even if you’ve had good links once upon a time, Google seems to think all links have expiry dates, and a once good link will eventually become stale. If you find that this stale link algorithm brings your page rank below what it should be, don’t worry; just carry on reading as we are going to go through some tips on how to get fresh links for old content.

Recently Matt Cutts responded to a user submitted question. This question was, “ does Google remove the effect on page rank coming from links on pages that no longer exist, for example, GeoCities pages that have been shut down?”. Matt’s answer was an obvious yes. But he further goes on to explain about the effect of a links ‘freshness’ and how old, ‘stale’ links also have little or no effect on page rank. What Matt said was that Google uses the current link graph, rather than a link graph of all time, and that this is done in order to keep page ranks and search results, new, relevant and ‘fresh’.

Now, although this is neither new or surprising to anyone who knows a little SEO, but it is a subject that needs covering, as some people will need help working with this. It may sound fairly easy to compensate for this, but it is much harder than it looks. We will go through some helpful information on this matter, and it could be useful to even the most experienced. Remember we all need a little help at times. Even if you have had a large number of good links a year or two ago, that alone will not keep your content doing well now.

To get fresh links, there are so many things you can do. The most obvious being; keep putting out fresh, new content, constantly. Try to write your content with some added staying power, as this tends to help. You need to link to your older content when it is appropriate, within reason, don’t go and start posting links like crazy everywhere, just try to be reasonable, you don’t want to annoy people and be tagged as a spammer.

You always need to encourage sharing of your content, don’t forget to place buttons on your site for publishing content to social networking and content sharing sites. With this, you need to make sure your templates are the same for new and old content, so the same sharing options are available. So if you get a new template, make sure you update all the old content pages. If people find their way back to old content, then they are still likely to share this content if encouraged.

Go over your old content all the time, and see if you can find anything still relevant. If you can find relevant stories, then you can update them with new posts, making them fresher and making it more likely for people to view and then share this content. Then if you also link to the original article people will go to the original, if they are interested and then they will be sharing it as they see fit if they are encouraged to.

Always leave your comments section turned on. This promotes linking, and if many people are having a discussion in the comments section, it keeps that content fresh and relevant and increases the popularity of that content, resulting in increased sharing and linking from visitors. Sometimes, people will link to your article purely because of something in the comments section.

Sharing old content through social networking sites, such as twitter and Facebook can be done, but only when relevant or appropriate. If you just go on twitter and start filling up your page with tweets on old articles/content, then some people are going to be annoyed with you and will probably stop viewing your page. Just do the relevant ones at the time, or if some older content is appropriate to add to the conversation at the time. A follower that has never seen it before, or maybe just forgot about it, may want to link it, so it's always useful to repost old content on social media, only as and when appropriate.

If you think you know any better ways to keep old content ‘freshly linked’ or you just have a comment or question, just drop it in the comments area, and someone will get back to you if you required a response.