Need to switch Google rankings, help

I'll be surprised if ATS can help here, but let's give it a shot.

I have a tutorial online for some specific software how-to's, however when I Google the newer tutorial (on the same exact topic) the results show the older tutorial as the first result and the newer one many pages later. Is there some way I can have the older tutorial jump to the newer tutorial without losing my Google ranking for the older one?

Even if I killed the old tutorial and replaced it with the newer one using the same link, would Google nix that page?

I guess I'm trying to figure out how to keep the same Google ranking as the old tutorial, but have the newer one show up in its place.

Any and all help is welcome!

Are you using PHP?

reply to post by VoidHawk


Straight up HTML. Someone just told me about 301 redirect from the old page URL to the new page URL - I don't know what that is?

If I understand correctly the scenario is something like...

1. Result of someone else here
2. Result of someone else here
3. OLD LESSON HERE
4. Result of someone else here
5. Result of someone else here
6. Result of someone else here
7. NEW LESSON HERE
etc...


Is that right? In order to swap the rank between those two, you'll have to do some SEO stuff. It's not something that can happen overnight but you could pull it off. First, you'll have to figure out how many websites link to the old lesson. Say 100 websites link to that old lesson but only 40 are linked to that new one, then you'll want to figure out a way so that any other website linking to your lessons will be linking to your new one.

The easiest way to go about this is to go to the old lesson and have a notice that says "This is an older lesson, to view the NEW LESSON click here" or something along those lines. Make it clearly visible so that people clicking from that old link will be navigating to that page. Google will know which page goes where if you have Google Analytics setup. This is the most reasonable way to do this, as a 301 redirect may hurt your overall SEO ranking on Google or whatever since it's not the proper method to redirect. However some folks at the Google HQ told me that they don't really care about redirects or 404's anymore, they just care about what's available now and if you're trying to cheat the system.

Alternatively you could always improve the content on the new page by analyzing why the old page ranks higher. There are thousands of factors to consider but perhaps your old lesson has keyterms that are more relevant than your new lesson. I could go on and on about SEO but the simplest way to go about this is to just have your old page say that there's a new lesson available.