The homepage(first page up) of a news site I am involved with is ranking extremely well, on Google, for phrases and keywords in the content and meta tags. note: By ranking extremely well I mean that a search returns the website(homepage.com) in the first 2 to 4 sites listed on the first page of search listings.

News articles are being added regularly, BUT the current design of the site is such that the content of only ONE news article appears on the homepage. The other articles are LINKED to from the homepage.

I presume the website homepage ranks so high on the search engine because of the content of the ONE article on that homepage. Links to more news articles on the website are being added regularly, BUT is that enough to keep the ranking high or will the search engine, at some point soon, regard the same CONTENT of the homepage article to be old or stale and begin reducing the homepage rank?

The plan is to put a new article on the homepage every 6 months or so while numerous other articles added to the site will be linked to from the homepage. All articles, including the homepage, have a link on them designated as their permalink using rel="bookmark".

Frankly, we want to leave the same homepage article, whatever article it is, up for as long as possible in a case like our current one BECAUSE that page is ranking very high. If we are able to detect it beginning to drop BECAUSE of old content, then, of course we will switch another article to the homepage, BUT we want to "milk" the high rank of the current homepage article for all we can.

note: I realize there may be other reasons for a drop in the rank of the homepage, but my sole concern here is a drop that can be attributed to the aforementioned reason. Their is no black hat seo involved.

or will the search engine, at some point soon, regard the same CONTENT of the homepage article to be old or stale and begin reducing the homepage rank?

Nope.

Thankyou for responding.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Nope.

The search engine will not "regard the same CONTENT of the homepage article to be old or stale and begin reducing the homepage rank" ONLY because we are regularly adding links from the homepage to more news articles. Right?

Originally Posted by 052808

Thankyou for responding.



The search engine will not "regard the same CONTENT of the homepage article to be old or stale and begin reducing the homepage rank" ONLY because we are regularly adding links from the homepage to more news articles. Right?

Unless there is someone else writing something very good about the same niche you rank well and he gets better links that you then there could be a ranking going down or else there is nothing wrong in it.

Originally Posted by 052808

Thankyou for responding.



The search engine will not "regard the same CONTENT of the homepage article to be old or stale and begin reducing the homepage rank" ONLY because we are regularly adding links from the homepage to more news articles. Right?

Wrong.

The only reason for "reducing the homepage rank" would be, as shabbir says, somebody produces something that is a better match for that particular query.

Originally Posted by 052808

The plan is to put a new article on the homepage every 6 months or so while numerous other articles added to the site will be linked to from the homepage. All articles, including the homepage, have a link on them designated as their permalink using rel="bookmark".

Google is now returning a page from my site in BOTH the 3rd and 4th positions on the first page for one particular search phase. The problem is I used rel="bookmark" on the link that leads from the 4th place page to the 3rd place page BECAUSE the 3rd place page is the "permalink" for the article that is on the homepage(4th place page). I am not really so happy about this because I don't want some competitor yelling duplicate content and I do not want Google saying I did something they don't like. Why isn't rel="bookmark" on the only link to the "permalink" page from the homepage good enough to prevent this.

maybe because rel="bookmark" means absolutely nothing at all to search engines

Thankyou For Responding.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

maybe because rel="bookmark" means absolutely nothing at all to search engines

Why? I thought that was what it was for.

What is a simple alternative that I can put in its place in the linking code to designate a "permalink"?

Do search engines normally keep "hands off" "permalinks" to avoid duplicating content? I assume they must.

Why? I thought that was what it was for.

Nope.

What is a simple alternative that I can put in its place in the linking code to designate a "permalink"?

Use that, It's what it's supposed to do (in browsers that support it)

Do search engines normally keep "hands off" "permalinks" to avoid duplicating content? I assume they must.

Nope, if it's linked to it will be crawled. Just don't worry about it.