Does linking older posts help?

[andzon]

Asking a blogger to add an anchor text into their old post that relates to my niche. does that help with backlinks?

does the quality of backlinks determine by how new the post is or the page rank determines all?

for example

a new post with lesser page rank vs a old post with higher page rank

which one is better to put your link on?

[Nishadha]

If all else is equal then the older page with the higher page rank. But it's hardly ever the case.

The older page might have a better page rank/authority etc but if its not getting any traffic at all then it might be a waste. The blogger might have expanded his readership and you might have a better chance of getting actual traffic to your site from that post.

Also the new post might get more links and acquire more authority.

The opinions may vary on the correct thing to do, but in general I only go for a link from an old page if its getting decent traffic via search engines.

[JaneCopland]

I have direct experience with this.

It looks to be pretty useless to contact the authors of old posts and ask them to insert links to your site, with anchor text or without. This was a very very popular link development tactic three of four years ago. It was pretty easy to scale and it was effective.

For Google, negative the positive effects of this tactic was likely quite easy:

• Cached versions of a page contain no external link to www.yoursite.com
• Page exists for extended period, gains PageRank
• Link suddenly appears on page to www.yoursite.com, often with optimised anchor text
• If you're being really obvious about it, you've paid for this link and set a time period of one year for the link to be up. All of a sudden after a year (or a set period), the link disappears, and www.yoursite.com seems to have a lot of links that disappear from older posts after one year. This is so blindingly obvious and easy enough for amateurs to spot: it's unfeasible that Google can't spot this too.

A natural link is going to appear in a new blog post, not an old one. How many times have you gone back and edited an old post to include a new link? I can think of once or twice in my history online where I have done that with the legitimate intention of adding a good resource to the article. I am not adding links to insurance websites, jewellers, etc.

A new post may or may not acquire authority, but if you are trying to place links based on authority, look at the website the new post will go up on. Do its posts regularly receive a good number of links, decent traffic, social media attention, etc.?

This tactic of placing links on old blog posts was effective in the past, but I would be confident saying that its effectiveness en masse disappeared some time around 2010.