Why Having Less Blog Posts On Your Home Page Could Help Your Rankings

Here’s something I never considered.

I have never cared much about pagerank, but in so much as it is an indication of incoming links, and spider activity to your site, it’s noteworthy.

For those who don’t know the way PageRank works, think of it like this…

Imagine your website is a funnel – a big opening at the top and a little spout at the bottom.

Then there’s liquid, let’s call it “Spider Juice”.

Each person that links to your homepage pours a little bit of spider juice into your website, or funnel.

The only thing is that this funnel doesn’t have one spout, it has many spouts. How many spouts does it have?

It has as many spouts as outgoing links you have on your page without a no follow attribute. If you have a blog that means all the links in your sidebar, all the ads you run, all the links to your post pages, recent posts, categories, links inside posts that are on the front page, and so on.

Then, each page of your website has it’s own funnel. Say a post is on the front page of your blog and that post of course has a unique url – it’s its own page. It links out to other pages too, alot of times the same ones from the sidebar, and whatever links you have inside that post, assuming you don’t use no follows.

So say 50 people link to your homepage and each of them (for the sake of explanation) contributes 2ml of Spider Juice. That means 100ml of Spider juice is coming into your funnel.

Assuming you are linking out to 20 pages or other sites from your homepage, that means each page is getting 5ml of Spider Juice. And so this continues down through the deep dark depths of your blog.

The more spider juice a page has, the better the pagerank but also the more likely it is to have the ability to rank for any term. In other words, the more spider juice each page of your site has, the better.

By now you might be thinking, ok, how can I decrease the number of places I’m linking out to from my home page?

I’m not a fan of throwing no follow links around willy nilly either but there’s one simple way to do this that I mentioned in the post title. In fact I’ve just done it today after coming to this realization.

If you normally show 10 posts on your blog’s home page and you cut it down to say 3 – that’s 7 less places for Spider Juice to flow, focusing it on a fewer number of pages and giving each more power.

Some people will say that taking some of your posts off the front page will give you less ability to potentially connect with a new reader – you’ve only got three posts to grab their attention. But I disagree for these reasons:

1. If a new reader doesn’t like what they see in your first three posts, I don’t think they would keep scrolling hoping to find some good content anyway… they’ll nick off to another blog.

2. If you use the Popular Posts plugins, you should have some of your best posts right up above the fold of your blog anyway, doing your best to capture attention with your best stuff straight off the bat.

So give it a shot, and see if you notice an increase in spider activity to your inner pages, or even an increase in traffic!