Are the links followed? No redirects? From cached pages?

It can take a while to witness the positive impact in SERP.

I don't foresee any such devaluation happening at least for next couple of years.

hi Rlilly,

you seem to be asking a good question but then introduce a red herring about adsense. unless you have research that shows adsense by itself impacts rankings, lets keep it out of this discussion and just focus on the facts :)

1st - sites have no pr. individual urls have pagerank. no one knows real pagerank data. toolbar pagerank is inaccurate and google only updates it 2-3 times a year. google sometimes gray bars urls that have pagerank and sometimes show green toolbar pagerank for devalued urls.

2nd - assuming the 20 blog pages all have pagerank and are not using nofollow tags or any other way of blocking the link juice, google still needs to crawl those pages to discover those links before they can reward your page. have you checked your log files to see those sites are referring traffic to you? links that send traffic tend to have a more positive impact. also have you given these links any time to age? brand new links are not always the same value of old links.

3rd - OOPs aka over optimization penalties. i doubt this is the case but it is possible that you triggered an oops or paid link penalty by getting 20 powerful urls with perfect identical anchor text overnight. how have you made sure your backlinks are natural looking?

4th - websites having no backlinks can still rank #1. if you 301 redirect an old url to a new url, that link juice can get a domain with no backlinks to possibly rank. i dont think this is the case. how are you checking for backlinks?

5th - Site usage is important. People talk about content & links being important to ranking. If you do some research you will see some correlation between site usage and ranking. Is your blog well visited and read?

hope this helps :)

@OMZen - all the links are followed. Allmost all of the pages are cached

@goodroi - agreed on the adsense. I have no research and it was a "funny" coincident.

> 1st - sites have no pr. individual urls have pagerank

I agree, however a post on a blog with a high PR almost allways will transfer more juice to the page with the inbound link and also more likely will be cross posted (via)

> 2nd - assuming the 20 blog pages all have pagerank

Most established blogs get thier new pages cached almost immediately after being published. Sometimes within a minute and the page appearing in the index instantanously. I check referal traffic in GA dailly and all those sites refered some traffic.

> 3rd - OOPs aka over optimization penalties

I doubt that also. Once observation if have found is that: "this amazing widget which is blue" seems to do better than "This amazing blue widget".

> how are you checking for backlinks?

Yahoo Site Explorer. If you have a better free method, please advise

> 5th - Site usage is important. People talk about content & links >see some correlation between site usage and ranking. Is your blog >well visited and read?

My blog is well read, and visited with a very good backlink profile. It is a subdomain on a very well established website.

Thank you so much.

MajesticSEO offers very thorough backlink information - and it's free for the site owner, although requires a fee for others.

I agree, however a post on a blog with a high PR almost allways will transfer more juice to the page with the inbound link...

I agree, especially with the almost always part. This is probably not the case but it bears mentioning anyway that sites that are selling links may have their ability to pass PageRank cut off. But I don't think that's the case with your situation, but it's worth looking into who those sites are linking to and if any of those sites they are linking to have extensive paid backlink profiles.

"For a longer string "free blue widgets" in this post, it is in position 6.... this amazing widget which is blue" seems to do better than "This amazing blue widget".

Ranking for two word phrases, especially with a minimal amount of links, could be hindered by words on the page that might cause Google to think the page is less about the two word phrase and get it dumped into a different category of meaning.

How on topic are the sites linking to your blue widget page? Are the siets themselves fairly general or are they tightly associated with widgets, whether blue, green etc.? For example, if the topic is fishing, are the sites about fishing or are they about hunting? If the topic is bass fishing, are the sites primarily about bass fishing or fishing in general? I have found that a tight correlation in topic (including the backlinks of those sites) helps, particularly with a small amount of links in moderately competitive SERPs. It takes a higher quantity of links in more competitive SERPs.

Hi Martinibuster

> linking to have extensive paid backlink profiles

I have not investigated that...

The post was about and offering "free .... widgets". Several popular freebie / giveaway sites posted about it. The rest were established designer blogs, mommy type sites and sites similar to lifehacker. I would say the post in general had a extremely wide appeal/interest and the targeted keyword is moderately competitive in SERPs.

The link count is actaully 35 and not all the links had the targeted keywords in anchor but a decent percentage.

Just a thought, could a "seasonal thing" have an effect on "moderately competitive SERPs" since the post had to do with Christmas?