Make a particular page with keywords appear in search results

[champ]

Is there a way to make Google pick a particular page among ten others for a keyword phrase?

I have ten different pages for a topic. I add a new page each year. Example: topic 2005, topic 2006, topic 2007...

Topic 2010 now appears in the google search.

How do I get topic 2011 appear in the search results?

I want to keep the old pages on the site but don't want them on the search results.

Thanks for the help.

[tedster]

Hello champ - welcome to the forums.

You can "encourage" this kind of choice, but certainly not "make" Google do anything at all. One tool you have is links that point to the page, both internal and external. This is the first thing I'd look at - internal linking needs to be strong to the current page and not so strong for the past dates.

Another tool is using a robots="noindex,follow" meta tag for the earlier years - although this would also mean that even for a query that contains the actual year, that URL cannot be returned. However, there's also a risk here that your site would no longer have the ranking.

[deadsea]

You could also put your 2011 content on the url that used to have the 2010 content and move the 2010 content to an archive page. That might be a bit awkward if your urls have the date as part of the file name though.

[goodroi]

Another option is to have the current year on the folder index page and after a year move the now out dated content to a new url. This would make it easier to focus the link power on one page.

example.com/elections.html (2011 info)
example.com/2010elections.html
example.com/2009elections.html
example.com/2008elections.html
in 2012 create example.com/2011elections.html