pontifex - 6:40 pm on Mar 24, 2006 (gmt 0)

Liane, thanks for taking the time to write such an entertaining and informative article from your point of view. Indeed I agree (mostly) with your statements, but the "authority model" can be beaten, don't forget that.

If your site has a certain age now and a serious amount of incoming links, it should be able to rank above the old site you mentioned, which has outdated content. If it does not, it does not mean, that the authority factor is the reason for that.

I also believe, that link-buying is not bad. It just needs a closer look and a tight time relation. If you buy text links for certain phrases and you spend a few hundred dollars to do so, it is most likely, that you take good care of your site, that you update it and that you are serious in providing something useful for your customers. That in combination with the "changed sites need more attention from SEs" could IMHO indeed be measured positive. If a site appears to be buying links and has not changed within 6 weeks, something is fishy. The problem is, that "good" spammers update their sites automatically with e.g. RSS feeds.

Evergreen content and content that needs updates: I would rather prefer to talk about sites in that matter. I agree that "History of the World War I" will probably never need any changes, but the site history.something will sure change over time, because new content is brought up daily about ancient events (just as an example here, to fit Lianes picture).

All in all I understand Lianes frustration about the authority topic, but after working 15 months on one topic alone, i am #2 for the most competetive keyword in my area (>180M results) and I have to admit, that #1 is at least as good as I am as a result for that phrase.

Age does not mean "authority" automatically and I think the lower rank of Lianes site compared to no. 1 is a result of link count and age of links. I would bet, the no.1 site outranks you with high pagerank backlinks?

Anyhow: great posting, thx again!

P!