Just for curiosity’s sake, I searched “learn Japanese blog” on Google and my old blog which hasn’t been updated in well over a year turned up near the top of the search results. On the other hand, this blog which is what I moved the old blog to is on page 4. I guess all those CS PHDs can’t figure out how to rank two identical blogs where one hasn’t been updated in almost 2 years vs one that still has an author.
Also, Bing seems to be pretty much exactly the same as Yahoo now.
Lame.
Do you mean the Nihongo 3yen stuff?
I’m guessing this:
1. There must be way too many ‘good’ (as in, non SEO-related, and few/non from spam farms) links to the old blog compared to good links to your current blog, which tells PageRank that the old blog is more authoritative.
2. Authoritativeness matters a lot compared to the sheer freshness of a page. No one really knows how their algorithm weights the indexed pages, but I’m guessing that freshness, at least related to the pages in the past 5 years or so, don’t matter much.
3. You left some good content still on those old pages. That’s a prime reason for why it might rank higher than the current blog. (Good old established content > Good new content)
Yup, that blog. Maybe it’s because of all the people trying to game the system but lately, I find that unless you know exactly what you’re looking for or facts on wikipedia, search engines are pretty clueless.
Ah well, this is probably the last time I’m going to whine about it.
Yes, a lot of it is based on how many other sites link to you and the quality of those sites. This one just hasn’t had the same amount of time to gain quality links yet.
The reason “Yahoo & Bing are pretty much the same now” is because yahoo entered into a contract to use Bing’s search technology…which is hillarious because yahoo’s old search engine was probably better. I’m just spitting this out for anyone who doesn’t know.