June 14, 2011
Time-Weighted PageRank
First off, I need to explain that I have no proof of my theories other than correlation data that I have personally analyzed on my various sites.
One of the most interesting aspects of the original PageRank algorithm is how PageRank flows through a website depending upon where a page is located in the site’s hierarchy. Moreover, if a link was very high up in the hierarchy it had more authority attributed to it and it would display higher in the search engine ranking pages (SERP). A side effect of this is that as content got older and was pushed lover into a site’s link hierarchy, it would lose authority and not rank as highly. While this is an assumption, it is likely supported by Google’s emphasis on fresh content.
But what about old content, that is very far down in a site’s hierarchy, and doesn’t have many external links pointing to it, how does that manage to rank well relative to new authoritative content? I believe that Google’s current algorithm records the prominence that a page once had and attributes authority to it that is independent of changes in flow of PageRank. For example, if a link to a page was once displayed very prominently on the homepage and on many other pages throughout a site, it will likely continue to rank very well long after it is removed from such a prominent position.
So what does this in mean in terms of practical application, when you publish new content on a site allow it to “marinate” so that Google’s spider can see how prominent it is and so that it will attribute lasting authority to the page.
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