Dave Smith and Greg Swann are two of my favorite people that I have never met in person (yet). Why? Because they are into some of the things that I am into. They are some of the best bloggers around. They can write far better than I and I like people that I aspire to be like. They are thinkers. They like to teach and inform, not just broadcast on the net. They are REALTORS. And they like to learn and experiment on their respective labs on the web.

A starting point:

“A house is just a place for your stuff. That’s why your “stuff” is “stuff” and everyone else’s “stuff” is “crap”.

–George Carlin

“A blog has places for you to put your stuff. They are webpages. Whether they are called pages or posts or even categories, a webage by any other name still ranks the same in Google if identically constructed.”

–Eric Blackwell
Just over two months ago Greg put a blog together as an experiment to test the search engine characteristics of a Wordpress blog constructed out of pages rather than posts. Essentially this challenges my position stated above. One of these characteristics was how many of the pages would stay fully indexed in Google as opposed to slipping to their supplemental index. Would this be better than a blog constructed of posts? Was / Is there an appreciable difference? This was and is a concern to bloggers in that their individual posts slipping into the supplemental (can) affect the amount of exposure that a post gets on the web.

Greg’s results as reported earlier today on the RealEstateBlogLab are impressive.  With essentially pages only and no posts, Greg recorded just 6 pages slipping to the supplementals. More impressively, the pages that were there were ones that you’d expect to find in the supplemental index.

Now me, being the hands on search engine “figure it outer” guy that I am, I have to look at experiments like this and offer some explanations and present them to the rest of the blogging world for their comment. Here goes:

The key to this experiment lies in the question Why. Why did the pages stay indexed? Why do posts slip into the supplemental index? Here are some hopefully enlightening answers:

1) Greg’s test blog was constructed with many of the pages essentially linking to each other.  If you look down the right hand column of the blog, you will see MANY of the posts (errr….pages) there on every page. This “interlinking” is not veiwed by Google as an incestuous thing. It is simply good navigation. It is esentially providing many more inbound internal links to EACH post.

Here’s a truly ugly sketch of it….

2) In a typical blog construction with posts (errr…posts) you would not have near the interlinking that this blog has. This is because posts are typically arranged in a heirarchy (errr…categories–grin).

What interlinking does is SPREAD the link love between webpages and the only (errr…easiest) way for Google to decide which pages belong in the main index is how much respect they have on the web as expressed by link love (internal OR external).

The takeaway: When constructing a blog, set it up so that there is the maximum opportunity for interlinking to occur. Given the same amount of links from the outside, your posts and pages will get more exposure this way. It also provides your reader with easier navigation. Win-win.

Takeaway #2: Get links to pages either from external or internal sources to keep them in the main index.

Great job on the experiment guys. Please feel free to comment on this…