Aging Inlinks And Pr, Do old inlinks from great sites still carry great value? Options

[nuts]

I have not seen this question addressed. I have one site with a large number of organic inlinks from great sites, universities, etc. They have been there for years. You can find them with Yahoo but not with Google using link: .

I am developing the impression that a link, even if it comes from a "valuable" or "popular" site, has more value if it is recent, and declining value as it ages.

Also, I am wondering, if a site was penalized for some reason then fixed/reinstated/whatever, do the old (pre-penalty) inlinks still carry value?

Also, as a separate issue, I am slowly coming to a conclusion that a site can be too big for its own good. If a site has, say, 5 million pages, even if they are sitemapped correctly, perhaps it is better from an SEO point of view to have smaller sites, say 50,000 pages. Plus, if some errors/bogus-web-lint-type-crud slip in to a huge site, they can be harder to spot, also making smaller sites easier to debug. However, from a business/branding/name-recognition point of view, possibly the single larger site is better. This may not be a clear-cut issue.

As always, open to comment.

Cheers

This post has been edited by nuts: Jan 5 2009, 07:31 AM

[A.N.Onym]

Google doesn't show you the links using the link: command. You can try seeing the blogs that link to you by using the command in Google Blog Search.

So yes, those links from old, great websites are the best links you can get. In fact, everyone's trying to get the links from those old, great websites


Are those millions of pages unique and useful content?

Most likely, most of the pages contain the same content, so it'd be worth consolidating them into one or at least redirecting most of the copies to one. Then again, I don't know the details, hard to say, really.

Some indexed URLs are just the same post, so comments should be blocked with robots.txt. There are other types of such pages on the site (such as comment feeds for each post, etc).

All in all, if all the pages on your site are useful to the visitors (and also to visitors arriving from the search engines) and they are well interlinked, then I don't think it'll hurt the visitors.

This post has been edited by A.N.Onym: Jan 5 2009, 11:23 AM

[nuts]

Thanks Yura

Actually all pages do contain unique and useful content, it is a site that has been developed over many years of research, there are some 3-4 million database records displayed. It suffered from some penalty in 2006 and has never recovered, despite complete revamping, multi-seo-experts, several reinclusion requests, heartache, suffering, blood, sweat and tears.

One element that is seldom addressed in seo circles is "content entropy", that is, once you develop unique content, it ceases to be unique, it's unique-ness evaporates over time. They used to say the internet doubled in size every 10 months. Who knows what that figure may be now?

To avoid gurgle linking, it is he*lth c*re hiring dot com replace the * with an a. I know, I know, there are still plenty of little glitches, but I had to put this site aside and concentrate on avenues that seem to be producing results -- you can follow some of the directory links at the bottom of the index page, and at an age of 3-6 months some of them are ranking pr3 with the only inlinks being from their own little incestuous grouping.

Cheers

[A.N.Onym]

The problem with abandoned old sites is that competitors appear weekly and monthly, all building links and promoting their content. If you don't work on your website, they might as well outrank you for many terms.

You are right that unique content becomes a bit less unique, but it's a matter of quality and time invested in creating it. If someone else can duplicate the efforts, then yes, your unique content isn't unique any more.

But the thing is that it is links that influence, who ranks higher, not just content. You need to continuously work on creating link-worthy content and promoting to rank well, anyway.

If you want to start ranking, I'd recommend you to:
- create content, aimed to get links, and promote it
- link to strategical pages (categories or important end-pages) from the promoted content
- block duplicate pages from indexing, if you have them
- make navigation easy: the less clicks it takes one to get to the most detailed articles, the better
- provide related links on most pages: improve interlinking

You can try creating useful tools, widgets, software and create materials to be distributed by your target audience and promote them.

Also, if you link to any sites practicing something outside Google guidelines, you should remove links to them.

You might want to read the recently released SEO guide (PDF), written by Google, to see what's acceptable and recommended.

Btw, having a single site is better, as long as it targets the same target audience. It makes it easy to build links and makes it even more efficient, because every link to a site helps all the pages, to an extent. That's why good interlinking helps.

This post has been edited by A.N.Onym: Jan 6 2009, 05:33 AM