New Links in Old Articles

[brianmadden]

We have recently launched a new website for a brand that always existed in our company, but never had its own website.

Now I'm looking to increase it's organic visibility. We had quite a few links coming into our other sites, when in fact they would be more relevant to our new site. The only things is I found a really good one from 2012 - what would be your thoughts on asking the author to change the link? How would Google view? Would I damage the organic visibility of the site it is currently linking to?

Thanks,

Brian

[jlane9]

Hello Brian,

There would be two issues at play here, your original thought to update the link would be a good idea for the new website. A link on an established website with domain and trust authority is a great link.

The issue of hurting your existing website is also a factor. Depending on how many links the existing website has, if it were to lose one of its best back links, that could affect the existing website. If its only 1 out of hundreds or thousands I would not worry too much. I would do a complete review of the back links to the existing website to determine if I would request the change.  Based on number of links from high PA web pages.

In the eyes of Google, I would think that if you updated an old link to a new more relevant link - that would be seen as a good thing not bad in any way.

Hope that helps,

Happy Holidays - Joe