Why Republishing Under a New URL Can Make a Dead Page Rank #1

0:00This is just a reminder that if you have a page targeting an easy keyword that you think should be indexed. Page should be indexed. The keyword is not being targeted by competitors. I'm targeting this keyword properly. My page should be indexed and it is not indexed and it hasn't really been indexed or not very over the course of its lifetime because you're tracking the keyword that the page is targeting and you see that this page completely underperformed. This episode is a reminder that if you just slightly if you just wait you wait a little bit of time you continue to put up content in the topic that this page

0:35is targeting. Some of these pages start ranking. Some of these pages start getting clicks. You become more relevant to the topic. You're building a couple links here and there to your site and then you republish the original page. You take down this original page. Simply change the URL. That's it. Add a word or two to the URL. The URL is still targeting the keyword, still relevant to the keyword. 301 redirect the old page's URL to the new page's URL. Cuz you just

1:01added a word or two to the to the URL. So it's republished under a new page. The old page is 301 redirecting to this new URL. The content hasn't changed. The only thing that changed was the URL. This is just a reminder that if this scenario has happened to you and you do this there is a good chance that not only will you be indexed for your target keyword which you should have been indexed for in the first place, but you will be ranking well. And this is exactly what happened to me and I'm going to break this down on this episode of the show. I've talked about it

1:30before, but something that a lot of people forget. If you're new in SEO, you might not know this. And if you're old in SEO or if you've been doing SEO for a while, you might have just forgotten. Oh yeah, I should do that to a couple of my URLs that aren't ranking that should be ranking. When you publish a piece of SEO content, it is judged by the topical authority that your site has. How authoritative is your site to the topic that this URL is covering? Sometimes what happens is it's not very. And so, your page might rank momentarily, but then it's just going to be taken out of

2:03the index. And if nothing happens for years, so this is actually a quote from David Quaid. David is coming on the podcast tomorrow. He's probably the guest who's been on the most on the show. He's just one of my favorite people. And this was actually one of the first things that we talked about when he first came on the podcast. But this is something that he said. He said, "A common reason something won't rank on Google, especially if it's targeting an easy keyword, is because you didn't have topical authority for it when you originally published it. So, republish it under a new page and Google will

2:33re-evaluate it with your updated topical authority." Specifically, what happened to me and maybe you will have a relevant experience. I created a page targeting an easy keyword in March 2023. Page didn't rank at all because my site didn't have topical authority for that keyword. It wasn't relevant enough to the keyword. I forgot about the page,

2:54but I was tracking the keyword. Suddenly, I see a year and a half later, it is ranking number one out of nowhere. But the keyword doesn't get enough clicks on Google because it's a low-volume keyword. Google doesn't have, because it's not getting any clicks, Google doesn't have enough information to discern the value of the page. And because the page was judged with the original topical authority that it had when it was created, it falls out of the

3:20index. And then it stays like that. Stays like that until I change the URL in March 2025, republish it, and less than a month later, it is ranking number one for the target keyword, and it has been ranking number one for this target keyword since. This is an excerpt explaining what's going on from the first time David Quaid came on this

3:40podcast. As you know, um Google calls every URL the canon, right? And that I think comes from Catholic law. Like, so when when the when the Catholic Church lays down a law, right? That's law for all citizens in all countries. It's called the Canon law, right? So, the Canon is your URL, and Google doesn't like any variations to it. And so, a lot of newbies will say, "I've changed my URL." And I'll get all semantic and go like, "No, you didn't change your URL. What you did is you had an old URL, and you introduced a new URL, right? There's no Even if you 301 it, it's still a newer URL." And

4:11that's important because the Canon has all of the topical authority, and it's unique to that Canon. And so, when you've got a page that doesn't rank, and like you said, it's in crawl.not.index to discover.not.index, which I think is probably one of the most popular questions for newbies, especially on Reddit. And people say, "Oh, it's a It's not about It's about your content not being good enough, right?" And that's fair because that is in a That is in a couple of videos that Google have released this year from Switzerland, from the Google team, where they say

4:39it's because we don't like your content. What they actually mean, or at least I infer what they mean, is no one's linking to you, therefore we think the quality is no good. Because what you've just said is you took the exact same content that was crawled and not discovered. You know, if you go to GSC and say, "Crawl this page." It takes a few seconds while it lets the bots go and fetch the page, waits for any timeout, and then it gives you an instant feedback, right? It says, "I've read the page. This can be indexed." And then you hit crawl or or request, and it

5:08doesn't go back in. And you're like, "Wow, well, maybe it doesn't like my content." But then, how come 2 years later you picked a new slug? So, here's what's going on. The new slug gets a brand new start. The new slug gets a brand new start. If you want to build topical authority, actually get organic clicks, clicks from search in the topic that your page is targeting. Get backlinks in the topic that your page is targeting. This is also why you should be tracking your keywords. A lot of people who are starting in SEO don't even track their keywords. If you are doing SEO where you

5:42are deliberately targeting keywords with your website, track them. And so, if you see a pattern like this, where the keyword is not being targeted by other websites, as in the keyword doesn't appear in other websites URL slugs or page titles, but it does appear in yours, and it's not a super high volume keyword, and you're not indexed for it, just try republishing it under a new URL. One of the most interesting things in SEO, and an easy way to make well-optimized pages that should be performing actually do their thing and perform in search. This is episode 1,125 of the podcast, a shorter episode today, but still an impactful one. David again

6:24will be on tomorrow, and this next week is going to be crazy with guests. If you want to get my method of SEO, save years learning how to do search engine optimization that specifically targets people looking to buy right now, SEO that gets customers, that gets users, that gets warm leads calling you on the phone, my course at compactkeywords.com will do just this. That's all for the podcast, 1,125 days in a row. Let's go. If you watch this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you again

7:00tomorrow. Bye now.