“The dead don’t haunt the living — they haunt the ones who keep them around.”
SEO Séance isn’t nostalgia—it’s triage. We’re not summoning phrases for vibes; we’re reviving use-cases, giving each page one clear job, and burying the rest. Light the candles, sharpen the title, and let the dead earn their keep—or stay dead.
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- Stop nostalgia-ranking.
- Run a clean ritual: diagnose, decide, rewire, and move on if it flatlines.
Why keywords “die”
Searchers evolve. “How to write a blog in 2020” became a history query, not a how-to. You publish near-duplicates and cannibalize yourself. Google routes generic heads to brands and knowledge panels. Freshness decays. None of this is personal; it’s gravity.
The ritual, done properly
Start by pulling the right bodies: pages that once had a pulse (clicks, impressions, backlinks) and now don’t. Autopsy each one and name a single cause of death—intent drift, entity competition, self-cannibalization, snippet displacement, or plain staleness.
Choose a fate.
Resurrect: Same URL, new promise and structure.
Reincarnate: Merge duplicates into the strongest URL; 301 the rest.
Exorcise: 410 truly obsolete stuff.
Rehome: Fold the content into a hub and use the old URL as a feeder.
Change the promise, not just words. “How to Write a Blog in 2020” → “Launch a Blog in 2025: tooling, formats, what actually works.” Keep a tiny “then vs now” block to catch nostalgic tail.
Wire the room. Use the right schema (HowTo/FAQ when it fits), compress intros, lead with outcomes. Add two natural internal links to living hubs with intent-honest anchors.
Check the pulse in 28 days.
- Impressions up, CTR down → sharpen title/meta.
- Clicks up, bounce up → first screen overpromised.
- No movement → merge or 410. Don’t argue with the coroner.
What we’re not doing (it’s 2025)
No LSI word salad. No stuffing intros to “help Google.” No redirect mazes. No zombie updates where you swap a paragraph and today’s date and call it a refresh.
Three patterns that still work
“Then vs now” blocks on evergreen topics; tidy task tables (inputs → steps → outputs) for models and humans; outcome checklists that define “you’re done when…” and quietly win snippets.
The séance scorecard (keep it simple)
Fate: rewrite / merge→URL / 410 / rehome→hub
Intent now: tutorial / comparison / checklist / opinion / tooling
Top entities covered: three that matter
Internal links added: → Hub A / → Hub B
Kill-switch date: if no lift by X, merge or 410
Close the circle
We’re not summoning dead phrases for nostalgia. We’re mining them for clues about what the audience wanted, what changed, and what still pays. Give each page one clear job, wire it into the living, and let the rest stay buried. The séance ends when the page earns its keep—or disappears.
