By Scott Goodyear
When you look at the number of links pointing back to your site, it is usually good to see the total number increasing. This often means that you are doing something right. When dealing with client expectations, you may need to explain to a client that just because the number of links go up, this does not necessarily mean that all of their rankings will go up in turn. It may, in some ways, be helpful to explain to your client that links can often be radioactive in nature. They can provide a benefit today that energizes your rankings, helps it to gain traffic and conversions, to start a conversation about a product or service, and so on, but many links lose their strength to provide these actions over time.
Links that might be considered “radioactive” are those that have the potential to bring a lot of popularity to your site and provide some great uplift to your rankings but only for a limited time. After some time, they might be spent or depleted of their ability to help.
As one example, lets say that Google just so happened to visit Best Week Ever this morning. And it looks like they have…
One of the posts on their front page today, leads to a page that talks about a cat toilet. Not too exciting, I know. While the post on their main page talks about and links to the manufacturer, Google and other engines will see that link back to the manufacturer and they can associate a bit of the page’s popularity to that link. In this case, Cat Genie, has a PR7 page pointing back to it from BWE.
As the BWE home page adds newer posts, the Cat Genie post will be buried further (PR7), and further (PR 5), and further (PR 0) into BWE’s site structure. As the link moves deeper into the site, most of the benefit that Cat Genie’s rankings had gained from this link will decay or disappear.
While this is just one example, there are many hundreds of thousands of blogs, forums, social bookmarking sites, news aggregators, and other sites that have this same process at work. I know that PR is a lousy measure by most accounts, as it is not updated for updated for months at a time, and there are indeed many factors aside from PR that engines like Google use to rank a page. Understanding this concept of link radioactivity, depreciation or whatever you want to call it, may help you to explain to clients and others why link building is not a one time action. This understanding can also help when trying to explain why even with a huge number of links behind them, a site may still no do so well in the rankings. Even with a good volume of links behind them, sites can – seemingly out of nowhere – find that their rankings tank through no fault of their own.
Tags: Links, Search Engine Marketing, SEM, Social Media
