How to fix a broken old website to get higher ranks on Google ?

In SEO, getting things right for an old website is easy compared to a new site, right ? Or so is popular belief.

Because the old website comes with it lot of added advantages, SEOs needn’t work from scratch to build it up and get the bots crawling in. Mostly, a comparatively older website would have more incoming links, more domain references and authority and a better rapport with the search engines.

I get approached by both old and new sites alike, but most of the times, the older websites are harder nuts to crack mostly because would be lacking in certain metrics, which obviously is pulling them down the SERPs.

Let me try and discuss with you some of the common problems faced by the older websites keeping them off the good books of Google despite the domain age.

1. An obsolete content management system
Mostly they would be built on a CMS that the owner itself wouldn’t have a clue about.

2. Lack of content.
The site would have enjoyed good response from the search engines earlier, but with the competition growing, there would obviously occur a lack of volume in contents on the site and the site undergoing a slow death.

3. A poor link structure.
With bad CMS’s come bad structures, modules, plugs and all that. Forget SEO, some CMS’s doesn’t even have the basics right.

4. Use of tables and not-so-seo friendly elements.
They aren’t that bad, and are only “fixable”, but they would be available in plenty on the site that it would take ages to fix them all.

So fixing an old broken site takes as much as time and effort as a new website. I normally make it a point to do things one by one starting from the scratch so that I don’t mess things up and its easier to track the results.

A typical SEO fixing process for an old website would look something like –

1. Fixing the site structure.

2. Getting rid of the broken links.

3. Identifying the most important pages on Google and leveraging on them.

4. Obviously, keyword research (probably with a focus on competition)

5. Stripping off unwanted and obstructive elements from pages.

6. Optimizing the code.

7. Creating a sitemap, with a better linking pattern.

8. Content development with a focus on competition.

9. All the on-cite optimization processes.

10. Finally the link building and promotion.

Essentially, even though the SEO processes sound the same, the time and effort that goes into fixing an old site is larger compared to new sites. May be its right to say that the on-site optimization part has to be worked more for the older websites, compared to newer websites, which may have sound on-site metrics, but a weak offsite presence.

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