Custom orders. . .

I can and have done custom orders for both chainmaille jewelry and the wire wall art.  I have no problems doing custom orders but from what I have been reading in the forums it seems there is a chance that it's not helping my shop ranking or search.  I have always know that Etsy's search is "weighted" giving an advantage to shops that have "aged" and have a good record of sales and positive reviews.  When I was new last year I couldn't be found anywhere in search, I have worked hard on my listings tags, keywords, titles, descriptions to improve my position but now I'm wondering if it simply was an "age" factor that help more than all my hours spend tweaking and re-writing.  Once I got a couple of sales I moved up, one of my sales was to an online friend and she left a 5 star review and I moved up.

Now my concern is I have seen others talking about how selling the same listing over and over along with favorites and clicks increase it's relevance in search.  So my custom listings and one of a kind things that become "sold out" aren't really helping because when something becomes sold out instead of renewed and relisted you lose the clicks/views and favorites.  Making new listings rank lower than renewed reused listings?  This seems weird and a bit unfair and I'm not sure what to do about it.  I suppose I can try renewing the custom tree listing for the next custom tree but I'd have to change the photo and description to reflect the new one and I'm not sure if that would change the photo in the review from last time to the same new photo making the "custom" look like a generic reproduction instead of showing the two different.  

I have no problems using the same listings for most of the chainmaille as it's easy to reproduce the same item in the same colors, but with the wire trees no two are really alike, even when I tried to make 2 alike the didn't really turn out the same.  :-/  So I think I may be stuck just letting them go "sold out" since I can't really reproduce them exactly.