Gaming the Page Age Variable

Anybody else avoiding sequential topic development?

[ronburk]

As soon as it became clear that age-of-page was a variable being factored into Google rankings, I shifted from vertical keyword content development to parallel horizontal keyword content development.

More specifically, whereas I used to create a cluster of pages to target keyword X, then create a cluster of pages to target keyword Y (and so on), I now work on a few dozen keywords at a time. I create a page targeting keyword #1, then a page targeting keyword #2, and so on. After they all have that initial content, then I go back and repeat the process, adding an auxiliary page for each .

It takes longer this way to end up with enough of a cluster on any given keyword to rank on page #1. On the other hand, because there's more per-keyword delay built in, I'm unlikely to have done more work than is required to rank for any given keyword.

This approach seems to work fine -- but of course, I can't prove that the old way of just building content targetting one keyword before moving on to the next wouldn't have continued to work just fine too.

Anybody else got any data/opinions/SWAG on avoiding sequential topic development in order to avoid a (possibly imaginary) loss of rank for not appearing "natural"?

[tedster]

The way I develop, sequential topic development is almost unavoidable -- and I have not seen any new ranking troubles with this approach. I can see how first establishing a sold page for all targeted keywords "might" give you a small edge, but how much time delay are we talking about, anyway?