How long to leave a link up on index page?

I recently placed an internal link on my PR8 site and was wondering ...

[johnpinochet]

I recently placed an internal link (subdirectory not sub-domain) of my existing high PR site, on this same site's index page. The internal link was to an article I had written on a remarkably competitive and well paying topic, "Professional Widget Maker".

Amazingly, my article was ranked #1 on google for the above mentioned keyword phrase. Google spidered the article, and had it in cache within 4 days. I was number one within 7 days.

Since my site's index page is a general purpose page I wanted to continue placing article snippets and links to the internal page on my index page for the additional articles as I would write them.

I took down the article link to the above mentioned topic. Within hours, perhaps 12, my above mentioned article was gone, completely removed from the results, nowhere to be found. It would not even come up in cache. Occasionally it would come up in cache, but never in results.

Question:

Is this simply a normal course of events? I'm not referring to being ranked number one. I'm referring to Google removing a link from its index if said link doesn't remain on the original site beyond a certain threshold of days.

Please note that there is no funny business going on. The site design is very basic, purely 100% content based. I want to change article links to keep the content fresh, and have the new articles I write indexed.

[johnpinochet]

Just read some of the discussion on the release of Google patent info.

Is it possible to draw some conclusions to my above question based on this discussion?

[webmasterworld.com...]

[annej]

johnpinochet,

I link to new articles on my homepages to alert my regular visitors that I've added something new. This usually gets new articles into Google pretty fast but I've also noticed that the article occasionally temporarily disappears after I take down the link from the home page. Eventually it seems to get found again probably through the index page of the given topic. So wait and see if it comes back in a bit. If it is still of great importance leave it on your front page for a while.