Quality links are a significant component of great content. In fact, a good portion of content marketing and off-page SEO surrounds link-building best practices. If links are one of the best ways to get SEO and content optimization on your side, does their age positively or negatively impact your overall strategy?
Theoretically, the longer a link has existed on the web, the less value it would carry, right? Google and other search engines prefer fresh, modern links and good content. However, this isn’t always the case.
Google and Link Age
Many search engines don’t have dedicated ways of tracking a link and assigning it a given value based on its age. A piece of content with an older link won’t necessarily be penalized as a result. Dead links— that is, links that no longer work— however, are a different story. Say an outbound link goes to a defunct social media page. That doesn’t do much for search engines and can harm your content.
A link’s value does change based on the relevance of the target page. Say you have some high-quality content on your site that links to a news story you think would resonate with your target audience. You’ve optimized the content creation, keyword research, and meta description to reflect the content of that news bite. As time goes on, new information is released that renders the original story less relevant. As a result, the links from your blog posts start to lose value.
This works in reverse, too. That’s why a large aspect of content marketing and great content surrounds overall relevancy and ongoing maintenance. If you’re only focused on immediate content promotion and don’t put old web pages and blog posts through engine optimization, the backlinks to those pieces of content will start to lose value regardless of how strong a single keyword or meta description is.
So how do you combat this?
Evergreen Content
A term you’ve probably heard related to high-quality content is “evergreen.” Evergreen blog posts and web pages are ones that can stand the test of time and maintain relevancy. There are two ways to achieve evergreen content optimization. The first is by writing a piece of content that is so strong that, even as new information comes out, it won’t lose general relevancy. The other is through ongoing search engine optimization conducted by your marketing team. This means swapping outdated links, updating on-page statistics, and tweaking title tags or meta descriptions to better suit the user experience as time goes on.
Most commonly, the latter is the best strategy to obtain a favorable search result. You may even need to rethink your chosen keyword to retain an organic search presence. As time goes on, meta keywords can lose value in the same way that links can. The best way to check this is often through Google Analytics or the Google Search Console. These two tools can give you stronger insights into the performance of a given piece of content and help find areas of opportunity to either refresh or rethink it. This is one of the fundamental SEO best practices, and you’ll need to incorporate it into your content optimization strategy to ensure that you’re keeping up with the times.
Maintenance of Content Optimization
If you’re struggling to handle the finer details of optimization on your own, you can always partner with an agency. Agency assistance can save a business owner both time and money while ensuring their optimization is competitive and up-to-par. Link value shouldn’t fluctuate greatly, but when you see ongoing issues, it’s indicative that it’s time to take measured steps to ensure you don’t lose your target audience. Incorporating content optimization and link maintenance into your strategy can do you a world of good.
