How to retain those rankings gained from fresh content...

[RobertChapman]

Something tells me I know the answer to this question already but I'd always appreciate the advice of fellow professionals.

So.....fresh content is big now in Google, and i've seen some great examples of this. When launching a new product or unleashing (yes unleashing) a new blog post I see our content launches itself into the rankings for some fairly competitive terms. However after 1-2 weeks these newly claimed rankings begin to fade from the lime light.

So the question is, what do I need to do to retain these rankings?

We're active on social media tweeting, liking, sharing and +1ing our content as well as working to create exciting and relevant content via external sources. So far all this seems to have do is slow the fall from grace.

Perhaps this is natural. But i'd love to hear your thoughts, even if it is just keep up the hard work.

[JonathanRolande]

No worries

We release property every week and I do a blog post about each one, probably 2-5 properties each week then smash it out via social media (facebook, twitter, linkedin, etc). This seems to work quite nicely, though I only have to sell it once to be fair.

After this, we will also email the property out (with new content from that week), this gives that page a massive boost in traffic, which definitely slows down the process of dropping off the rankings, in my opinion.

So perhaps do a weekly email about new products and include some relative content in the email as well (as Matt said, link to the products in the content too!)

Doing this I have been steadily climbing up the rankings for my main keyword, last week I went up 15 ranks according to SEOmoz Pro! (It’s been about a month or two since I started doing this).

I think my main problem is that the site has a lot of old pages. Also the main pages need a bit of on-page optimization, so this may be something to look at as well J

[RobertChapman]

Thanks Matt,

Some very helpful feed back, this is exactly what we want to do as we know some of these search terms will be there for the long haul as they are related to some major products which we know will be popular until the eventual update/replacement.

[RobertChapman]

Jeff,

Thanks for the response. Both articles are exceptionally helpful.

Reading between the lines the decay is natural, especially when related to new terms being launched.

My challenge is to slow/prevent this decay from rankings, most of the terms I want to maintain are for new products which will be around for a while much like the releated terms. Ideally I would plant the flag early and defend my SERPS to the very last slot above the fold.

I like your strategy however, continued postings every week when a new product comes out to ensure we can maintain position.

[Matt-Williamson]

I have found to some extent that this is natural, however in order to combat this with one of the sites that I work on we have made sure that the exposure, especially through social media has been staggered, not hitting everything at once, so that it has been clear to search engines that the fresh content is still important in relation to the terms that it is ranking for. I have also produced content related to this in the form of a series clearly linking to the original so that every time one of the pieces of new content get traffic, links and social recognition so does the original piece showing that it still has relevance in the current rankings. I have found this has worked and we have kept pieces ranking like this.

[JonathanRolande]

Good question!

Google will boost the ranking of new content posted for a small amount of time because of this"freshness update".

It was explained really well by these legands http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-freshness-update-whiteboard-friday.

Also check this out http://justinbriggs.org/methods-for-evaluating-freshness.

So in answer to your question (and I'm no "expert" so this is just my opinion) keep posting new content regularly to rank for those keywords where google are knocking you after 1-2 weeks, and see it as a way to drive traffic.

I don't know of any other way, maybe someone can share some further insights