I am very fortunate in the SEO world as I personally own and have a couple of clients who have very old, aged domain names. These domains were registered in the 1995 – 2000 timeframe and have had great content added to them for a very long time.

They also dominate in search for a very wide variety of key phrases.

Problems with aged domains ranking for several key phrases

2 of the sites I work with have a very unique “problem”: their “money pages” do not rank and their home page does rank for unexpected terms.

Without giving away which URLs I ma talking about here, here is a hypothetical example:

HotDog.com ranks for “Hot Dog” – great!
HotDog.com ranks for “Pickle Relish” – great! But..
HotDog.com/pickle-relish/ does not rank for “pickle relish”. This is even though the keyword is used nowhere on the entire page.

pickle

Workarounds and solutions

In some cases I have had luck by adding a link to the home page to the desired landing page. I have had about 50% success with this.

Why does this happen?

You guess is as good as mine. One thought is that the domains have been linked to and referenced by people linking to the home page for the other terms. Another thought is Google feels that HotDog.com is the authority for pickle relish, so they are going to rank the page for pickle relish if people like it or not.

I guess it is a “good” problem to have.

Worries

I am personally occasionally nervous about the rankings. What if an algorithm tweak sends the domain’s pickle relish, ketchup, and mustard rankings into a tailspin?

Do you have this problem?

If you do please feel free to comment below or email me today. I would love to compare theories with you and discuss solutions or experiments which we could both try on our websites.

Len
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On January 4, 2016   /   SEO News & Tips   /   Leave a comment

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