SEO for pages with time relevant content for this year when previous years pages are ranking

Question

I'm publishing download information about Income Tax every year(during income tax filing period of April-Aug). Now the theory says that articles old by 2-3 years rank higher in Google's rankings than the similar but recent articles.

• So in 2010 the page title was Income tax 2010-2011 and it attracted huge traffic
• In 2011 the page title was Income tax 2011-2012 and it attracted very less traffic
• In 2012 the page title was Income tax 2012-2013 and it attracted very less traffic

So observing this after a month I removed 'Income Tax' from all the pages(3-4) except for this latest page applicable for that year. But no gain till August last year.

Now is the time for 2013-2014 Income Tax pages. I'm confused, how I should optimize the Income Tax 2013-2014 page(title+content) so that my pages can get high traffic as in 2010. Given old pages remain intact.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You should keep the title of the old articles, but make it clear that they are no longer current. There should be a big box on the top of the 2010-2011 article that reads:

IMPORTANT: This article is about the tax season from two years ago. Most people are interested in current, up to date information about the 2012-2013 tax season. Click here to read about current income tax tools.

Where you link information about the 2012-2013 tax season and Click here to the current article.

You should also make sure your home page (and other important places on your site) only link to the current article. Links to old articles should be rare and much harder to find.

This accomplishes the following:

• Allow users that come into the wrong article to quickly get to the right place
• Lets Google know (via links) which pages are the important pages. Google's PageRank and relevance algorithms should start picking the correct pages because of this.

I use this technique on my currency converter site. When a currency is replaced and the old currency is obsolete, I make sure that there is a big notice on the page for the old currency with links to the new currency. Both users and Google quickly get the picture and traffic starts flowing to pages that have the information that most users are actually looking for.