How can I get Google to rank some pages on my website higher than other pages on the same site?

Question

Every year I release new content on my Wordpress website that I would like Google to rank higher than the previous content on the site. Older content seems to rank higher right now, maybe because it is being linked to more from other sites than newer content. I am using structured data to tell Google about the publishing date of my content but that doesn't seem to help.

The structure looks like this:

• mysite.com/page-2023
• mysite.com/page-2022
• mysite.com/page-2021
• mysite.com/page-2020

When I release the new content I would like that to be ranked higher than the content from the previous year. What are my options to solve this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Here I am assuming that you are already aware of and doing the usual SEO.

Google tries to kind of learn, which URLs are good and interesting. This is why it will rank URL's higher where there has been good content.

If you put your new content to new URL's it is difficult for google to know how interesting the content will be for users. So, it may take time for new URL's to rise in rank.

If you have a page like mysite.com/news with high quality stuff which gets updated frequently, that would be an option to profit from your previous good content and previous good google rank.

You can also look at your case from the domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA) perspective. Any new URL does profit from your DA (as it is in the same domain) but its PA won't initially be as high as the content which has already risen in PA.

The other option to use the "rank juice" of old pages is to use redirects (from the old URL to the new URL). But if I understand your description correctly, this will not be useful to you, because you want to keep your old content online.