Replacing old blog with new blog on Google searches?

[slhamlet]

About 6 months ago, I discontinued posting on a Typepad blog and began posting on a new Typepad blog also with the same name-- same subject matter, just with a different URLs. The old blog is still online for archive purposes, while most of the popular posts from the old blog have been copied over to the new version.

The problem: for some reason, six months later, Google searches with "my keywords" among the keywords still only return links to the old blog. (Well, almost always.) It's not even particularly helpful to actually include the new URL. What's worse, the old blog is still generating *huge* amounts of traffic, 90% of it from Google searches. (The new blog gets little or no traffic from Google.) This despite the fact that the new blog is getting far more traffic, trackbacks, and links per month.

Is there a way to nudge Google to return searches that point to the new blog?

[edited by: engine at 11:43 am (utc) on July 19, 2006]
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[1][edit reason] Specifics. See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit] [/edit][/1]

[Quadrille]

The old blog is better established, has more inbound links, more content, and therefore quite logicaly has better page ranking than the new one for most search terms.

So long as you use it as an archive, you perpetuate that situation.

Is it possible to redirect visitors to the new one and close the old one completely? (be careful - some forms of redirect will make things worse).

If the new one is fairly well established, maybe it's time to remove the old one entirely, moving ALL the archive to the new one, so that searchers will be more likely to get the right results?

So long as it exists, it has advantages.

[slhamlet]

Thanks much. Unfortunately, it's not feasible to remove the old blog, as the account it derives from is still used by others. (There are several other sub-blogs on the secondlife.blogs.com URL.)

I understand why the old blog would show up among the top listings in a search for "New World Notes", the thing that's freaky is that the new blog doesn't show up *at all*, not even in the first hundred returns. This despite the fact that the new blog has a Technorati rank twice as high as the old one, regularly gets linked by big blogs like Boing Boing, Slashdot, Digg, etc. Any other ideas?

[SuddenlySara]

Duplicate content filter.

[Quadrille]

The older site probably has more links in total - and maybe more quality links; it likely has higher 'real' GPR; basically, it has the age advantage, which is very powerful.

Can you move back to the old one?

If not all I can suggest is that you try very hard not to have duplicate content; let each rank well for it's own search terms, remove the element of comptetion (which the 'wrong' one will usually win!).

Looks like you've created a textbook entry for several reasons reasons not to divide content between two sites.

Good Luck!

[slhamlet]

Ooof. Thanks!