Wrong article is ranking: what to do?

Hi guys,

an older article of mine is ranking #7 quite stable for a longer time now. Since the content is not that fresh anymore and I see room for serp improvement I wrote a completely new fundamental article for this search term and optimized it well on- and offpage-wise.

Unfortunately the new article is not ranking at all. I even linked from the old ranking article to the new one and took every article, which is related to the term and linked it to the new article. No serp movement at all. Now I don't know what to do anymore?

I thought about 301 redirecting the old article to the new one, or including the exakt content of the old into the new one and then deleting the old one.

Any hints?

Why does you remove the content.. Just research on keyword competition and add more targeting keywords on the fresh content . and do guest post on high authority websites

OP,
When did you post this new article ?

I wouldnt remove all the content, I will figure out the keyword that the content needs to improve.

301-redirect or place the new content in the old article, write updated on "date". Only when the search term and subject is the same ofcourse, you won't rank with 2 articles in Google under the same search term (unless it's very low comp).

Either 301 or ranking keyword to the new article from the old one.

You have multiple options

First 301
Second You can set the one post to be invisible to search engines/tell google not to crawl
Third Depending on the traffic of the indexed post, change the format of the article you want to be indexed. Have it a part 2 or have it a continued explanation of the first article. This shows relevance to Google and gives your users more content. Also, build backlinks with anchor txt.

As you say that you have optimized the content just right and already worked on internal linking (check the relevance of the anchors, though) - make sure the new page is not restricted from indexing and is visible to bots, and that it has enough external links leading to it, or consider building some new.

Still, this may take long for the new page to outrank the old one naturally as it`s less authoritative, so the 301 redirect would be an option as well, though it may cause some loss of link-juice halfway.