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Hi there,

we've been blogging for a while now. Some of our content ranks quit well, other posts don't seem to be ranking at all.

The weird thing (I think it's weird...) is that we recently published a post and focussed on a phrase that competes with over 400 million indexed pages, and after 3 weeks we're on page 3, and for other posts with only 2.5 million indexed pages we rank past page 5 (ok, this post is already 1,5 year old, does this matter?).

To give you some background info, we moved our blog in January in a new subdomain, and redirected the old url's, but didn't actively promote the old posts.

• Would promoting the old articles through social media help us boost the rankings for these articles (the articles are "best practices", "how-to's", ...).

• Where / how do you promote your content after you published it on your blog? I find it hard posting in LinkedIn groups related to finance while I have the "online marketing manager" title on my profile. Why would a finance professional read an article shared by a marketing dude?

• As LinkedIn's API doensn't allow to post into groups anymore, do you actually go through all your relevant groups every time you publish a new blog to share the article?

I think you shouldn't look at Reddit as being a source for building links directly from them.

Take a look at Reddit's purpose. It's to discover/digest your daily dose of content, and if you publish your link to Reddit people will or will not read your content.

It's those readers that will discover your content and if it's worth it, they will mention/share/link to it, and that's what's your after!

Already some good angles from Patrick,

I would go for the redirect as Patrick mentioned above, but there's one particular situation in which I would keep both sites, and that's if you're using another proposition for your products/services.

Let's say you sell sunscreen, and one is completely focused on sunscreen to protect the skin of your children, while the other one focuses on sunscreen to have a nice tan. Maybe a stupid example but I hope you know what I mean.

There are many situations in which people are looking for other stuff (or use other keywords/search terms) but at the end just need the same solution (in this case Sun Screen).

Pro of using both sites: you can get more targeted traffic and really focus the proposition on those people.

Con: you have 2 websites which you need to market, which can cost you more time (and money).

When you re-post, do you keep the original post in place or redirect it to the new post?

Thanks a lot!

I had to do the same stuff with a lot of sites when I moved from cheap *ss hosting to a hosting provider located here in Belgium with all of my client sites and this is what I did:

• Add the domain to your new hosting provider and set up a hosting account for this domain. The site won't be live under this domain name, but contact your hosting provider to  check where you can access the site and FTP with a temporary link.
• install WP, theme & plugins- export content on the live site using the Wordpress export, if possible export theme settings as well
• import the content on the new wordpress install you did on the new hosting provider
• change domain name settings. You can change the nameservers, but if that's not an option you can always add an A-record to make sure traffic is going to new server.

I'm aware that it's time consuming, but you don't have to get your hands dirty on PHPMyAdmin and this way the sites had zero downtime.