Adding backlinks in old articles?

[bloggingyourpassion]

I am trying to get a few more links to get a few of my pages to rank and I am thinking about adding some more backlinks on my own site on some of the old blog articles as well as some of my other related blogs.

My question is - is it still beneficial to link from these articles that are say 1 year old or more, or would it be far more valuable to write new articles on the blog containing those same links?

[EvolveCreative]

If I understand your question correctly you're asking what is the best way to manipulate Google rankings with your network of blogs? Add links to old articles or write new articles?

My answer would be - on the new articles.

And bring down your network of blogs. It will come back to bite you one day.

[bloggingyourpassion]

not exactly.  I own 3 well established blogs that are on related topics.  Some of the articles from each one are helpful to another and since linking from one helpful article to another would be good for the user experience, I am not really concerned about that.

What is your logic for the new articles over linking from the older articles?

[EvolveCreative]

If you're inserting the links to improve user experience why does it matter? Just insert the links where it makes sense.

[bloggingyourpassion]

Dave this is SEO-moz, so the whole purpose of my question was about SEO benefit

[MikeTek]

It won't hurt to link from older articles, but I'd take a look at what kind of Page Authority / PageRank these older articles have before bothering. If new posts, without generating any new backlinks from external sites, are ending up with about the same authority as those old articles, new/old probably won't make much difference.

One thing you might want to bring into consideration is the level of traffic, and through what keywords, those old posts are getting - if they're on related topics to the pages you're trying to rank, you can channel some relevant traffic to these pages while you're building the links by creating some more visual emphasis (instead of just linking some anchor text within the post, use a call-out box to entice some clicks).

There are a lot of unknowns from my standpoint, but that's my advice based on what you've described.