You were indeed right that it was a PR distribution problem, and that WP isn’t great for larger sites.

Luckily, I solved the problem already:

http://www.wolf-howl.com/blogs/category-seo-wordpress-blogs-ecommerce/

I tried the pager plugin by SEO Egghead, which didn’t quite solve things, afai can recall.

Thanks again for your help, and I look forward to further helpful responses like that. I’m adding a dofollow link to your post.

Cheers
Gab

It’s simply a matter of pagerank distribution. The older an article is the further back it goes & the less pagerank it receives.

Try putting up a sitemap with older posts displayed first. Build links to that.

Also use the Wordpress SEO Pager plugin by SEO Egghead. It will create links to every sub page on the homepage (page 1 page 2, etc.) and distribute a ton of all that pagerank you are holding onto from the homepage to those older pages…

Build some links to those subpages also…

Or just get more links to everyone of those older posts.

Hope it helps!

[ed: Thanks for the tips, Craig. GUys, check out Craig’s “Vacation Rentals” site.

Cheers
Gab
p.s. Appreciating all your work to help me solve this!

1. Create a Wordpress plugin which randomly shows an old article from the past at the top of your blog’s page – easily done with the “Stick X post to the top of Blog” feature.

2. Hire people from Get a Freelancer or Mechanical Turk to write a number of comments. (this also gives you an excuse to reply to some comments and make the old posts look new.

http://seoroi.com/facebook/
http://seoroi.com/index.php?s=facebook

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:seoroi.com+inurl:index.php%3Fs%3D&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls={moz:distributionID}:{moz:locale}:{moz:official}&filter=0

That looks like a very clever tactic, Rob, and is something I’m hoping to address in an upcoming post, either here or as a guest elsewhere.

On a related note, those scripts that constantly update the date probably have some value, as evidenced by the Google News screwup on the airline bankruptcy story.

Therefore, you could just keep changing content in your posts or encouraging comments on the older posts. I guess that means manual updates and drawing attention through posting. I.e. Look back on a past post and ask people “Comment on this article how you might do X better.”

I think Brett is on the money, talking about temporal relevance (Yes, I just made that term up ).

The fact that it’s a blog could be a factor to consider, and is perhaps what Joost was getting at in advancing pages over posts. Ergo, showing that a particular page is ‘evergreen’ and not related to a given period in time.

Unfortunately, testing this would require me to publish all new posts as pages though, seriously messing up my blogging and being detrimental to my RSS subscribers who currently get full feeds.

The short version is that density, if it matters, matters across the whole index. And since you don’t have that info, you can’t optimize for it – so don’t waste your time.

Thanks for the tip, in any case. I hope you don’t take this personally – just saying that the idea of KD doesn’t matter.

By definition, a blog is temporal. You’re not writing permanent pages, you’re writing comments that belong in a specific frame of time.

He argues that comments destroy your “carefully constructed keyword density” but I’m not so sure. I notice more traffic when I get comments.

You might like this: http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/#pagesvsposts