Most of the SEO techniques we teach you are related to how you should manage your content, write your content, and topics to attract customers. In our previous Nugget we explained in great length by you should remove the word "bridal" from all your online marketing and replace it with the word "wedding." That's a contextual change that will attract the right customers from Google.
We suggest looking through your site and replacing most occurrences of the word "bridal," but not all of them. Some people will still search for the phrase "bridal jewelry" so you should still be there for those few.
However, don't run to your old blog posts and replace bridal with wedding. That's the wrong strategy. Instead, you need to rewrite all those old "bridal" blog posts from scratch!
To explain why we want to tell you about another change Google instituted in March 2012. This one relates to how they discover and filter out old web pages.
The Google team actually made 2 different changes in March. They refer to the first one as [launch codename "oldn23", project codename "Freshness"]
They say they have a better method to detect stale web pages, but they don't exactly explain what stale means to them. We're guessing it related to both the date and the information on the page. Certainly a page that says "The price of gold today is $967" is VERY stale, but the time stamp on that page might be today's date if a CMS of some type if feeding the information.
Speaking of time stamps, for quite some time Google's had the ability to read the file creation date of web pages. The Googlebot is supposed to skip your web page if the time stamp of the file is the same as the time stamp fetched last time.
With news and blog websites there's usually a clearly visible time and date stamp of when the blog was posted, and who it was posted by. The second change Google made in March 2012 was referred to as [launch codename "fibyen", project codename "Dates"].
The goal of this change is to better understand the posting dates for blog and forum pages. This will allow Google to more accurately bubble the newest information to the top of the SERP.
These two changes further reinforce our belief that you need to continually add content to your website, and that a blog is the best way to do that.
Here are some specifics to remember about your blog:
1. Always include a posting time and date.
2. Always post more than 400 words in each blog entry
3. Always include a link to another page of your website from within the body of the blog entry.
and finally...
4. From now on, always refer to your wedding jewelry as "wedding" and not as "bridal."
As you rewrite your old bridal blog posts, Google will like the new content a well as appreciate the historical blogs that are still available.
