I hope you don’t mind…. I posted a longer response to your post on Sphinn. I agree that the practice of linking out at the Journal would be better if it were more consistent.

Alex Bennert

I agree. I have pages with zero PR that rank, but they are not ranking for competitive keywords. As far as your PR ranking bouncing, you may be getting different ranks through Google’s different indexes. Not all of their indexes agree on PR.

@Jeremy great post. The true lesson here for me is the need to continue developing content that is good for my audience and the all important backlinks will follow ( not that I am suggesting you stop looking for backlink opportunities as well).

For those who know little about SEO from the technical point of view, my advice is to keep writing regularly, preferrably original, useful and relevant content.

The medical field has alot to learn from the SEO industry.

For sites who are spreading their peanut butter thin (passing just enough to pages so that they have sufficient backlinks to stay in the Main index), a negative “adjustment” in the treatment of backlinks could cause some of their pages to fall into Supplemental, which as the site owner, feels pretty much the same as having a cap (sorry for reiterating what you pointed out on your blog, but it’s a really key point).

In my case, when this happened, the issue was that the pages in question were relatively isolated from the rest of the site (they were small market city pages, so they only had links to them internally, from our ’state’ page). The solution that got the pages back in the index was to increase their interlinking from within the rest of the site (specifically we linked to them from our larger city/market pages which themselves had a lot of deep inlinks), which pulled the submarket pages up enough to get them out of Supplemental (plus since the links were geographically-based, I like to think some semantic value was passed to the pages). Great comments, so much in SEO is a question of the practical consequences.

@Amy and @Jason Thanks for the comments! I think the email shows that whether a page goes Supplemental is a function of its backlinks (and then I made the leap to interpret that as 1) PageRank, 2) a finite spreadable commodity, and 3) that ultimately it can get so small it’s insufficient to help the pages who receive it get out of Supplemental). As a practical matter, on really large sites (the one I was dealing with now has >1M pages), you end up with clusters of tens of thousands of pages that are only getting PR from other pages on the site, so the PR available to pass into those clusters becomes a limiter.

Again, I’m assuming that the Peanut Butter Principle is true. If so, the PR of those other pages (who link to the cluster) becomes the determinant of whether enough juice is passed to those clusters of pages to stay in the Main index. The more PR they have, the more peanut butter there is to spread, so the more pages you can get in the Main index.

One interesting view on this, and I think Matt might have said this at SMX Advanced ‘07, is that new sites aren’t placed in any sort of sandbox, it’s just that they don’t have enough backlinks to get into the Main index.