Neil Shearing’s Internet Marketing Strategies

There was a PageRank jiggle recently… it didn’t seem to drop many bombs and passed quite quietly.

Soon after the PageRank jiggle, I got an interesting email…

—
Hi Neil,

I used Real Link Finder for about 30 minutes a day for a week or so when it came out. I posted relevant comments at related blogs and, I might add, enjoyed it thoroughly - discovering many new blogs and opinions in the process. This was a couple of months ago.

Today I was delighted to discover that my blog had gone from a Google PageRank of 0 straight to PageRank 5! That’s on a 6 month-old personal blog with absolutely no other promotion or link-building at all - seriously impressive results. Imagine what would be achievable with serious sustained effort using RLF!

I can’t recommend this simple powerful tool enough and wanted to personally thank you for making it available for free.

Kind regards,
Alex Poole
—

It’s always nice to get a testimonial… but it was also the first hint that something interesting was happening.

I asked Alex how he thought he got the PR5 and he said that, during his link building efforts, he got a few links from a PR6 blog, and he expected those links “to fade as new posts come out”. That was my first clue.

My second clue came from my Articles site, which was chugging along at 2,000 visitors per day. After the PageRank jiggle, the traffic dropped.

I thought I’d better start building some links into the site again because I hadn’t done any link building for a while.

My third clue came today, from Mike Liebner who wrote in his “Words Into Money” newsletter, “You need fresh links! Today and in the future“.

Ok, now I’m starting to see a pattern… “fading” PageRank from older blog posts, a site with “falling” PageRank and traffic because it didn’t get any recent links, and Mike saying you need “fresh” links.

So… here’s my theory…

1: Google loves quality sites.
2: Quality sites get links naturally, and they get more over time.
3: Google may have some kind of “PageRank Decay” where low value links expire over time.

This “PageRank Decay” would benefit Google, because if your site is getting low-quality links, and the PageRank of those links decays over time, you either have to always build more links, or give up.

Webmasters who are trying to manipulate Google will most likely be getting low-quality links. If they spend time building links, they’ll get traffic, but only for a while… unless other sites start linking to them naturally. If they don’t get any new links for a while, their traffic will fall.

On the other hand, if you build a quality resource that other webmasters choose to link to, your sites will maintain, or even improve, their search engine rankings naturally.

I’m guessing that Google only applies PageRank decay to low-value PageRank links. Presumably, the age of a link from a top-quality website would not affect its value. I would imagine that anyone who had a site good enough to get a link from a PR8 or higher site would not see the value of that link dwindle to nothing in six month’s time. Sites with PageRank8 or higher would thereby form a “backbone” of quality, trusted sites from which PageRank would flow to lesser sites.

What do you think? Do you have more evidence for PageRank decay?

The bottom line is that, if you accept PageRank Decay exists then anyone who works really hard to build “low value” links into their sites will have to keep working hard just to maintain their traffic.

PageRank Decay is like a hamster wheel for webmasters who build sites that don’t get natural links.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Current posts, PageRank. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.