Here’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while which I’d like to get your opinion on. Let me talk through the issue as I see it and then see what you think.
Let’s assume that you are the lucky owner of www.website.com. After spending time building up a relationship with the owner of www.blog.com, they finally agree to write a blog post with a nice, juicy, keyword-rich link back to your website. Now comes the good news: you immediately see a jump in your rankings. The link was worth its weight in gold. This SEO game is easy.
2 weeks later you come into work and spot that your newfound rankings have gone. Being the conservative white hat that you are, you’re sure that you haven’t got a penalty, so you get out your SEO spade and start digging.
The issue (if I can call it that) I want to talk about is due to the fact that the “magic link” you had from the www.blog.com has slipped off the blog’s homepage.
Unlike your average website, the reason the link has fallen off the homepage isn’t a bad thing. A subpage of www.blog.com still links to you. You haven’t been editorially removed–it’s just that in the normal day to day activity of a blog, your post has been superseded by other, newer (not necessarily better, just newer) blog posts.
The reason the rankings have dropped is likely to be because of the difference in page rank of the two pages. Like most traditional websites, the nature of the beast means that the majority of links to a blog point at the homepage. When on the homepage, you get an extra boost of link juice because of those inbound links, but now that your link has fallen off the strong homepage, that link has less juice to pass on, and your rankings plummet because of it.
One the one hand, this is how things work, nothing to see here, move along now.
On the other hand, it seems a bit odd that all links from a blog go through a cycle of passing lots of link juice, then after a random amount of time (determined by how quickly the author churns out new blog posts) the link is worth less. It feels right (to me) that there should be more of a smoothing effect on these links; after all, you haven’t been editorially removed, it’s just what happens.
Obviously, this smoothing effect can’t just create page rank from nowhere just because it is a blog. If I suggested that, I’m sure Will or Hamlet would counter with some incomprehensible jargon about how “as x tends towards wednesday, page rank wouldn’t converge…. “, and I’d have broken the internet. But that’s someone else’s problem.
If you were a search engine, would you try to smooth this effect or would you just live with it?
Duncan is the quieter director of Distilled, where he spends most of his time trying to persuade Will and Tom to stop commenting on SEOmoz and to get on with some work.
