I have a question for all you SEO geeks and gurus out there.

As you know, at LeadGenerators, we’ve been writing Viral Link Articles, creating key phrase rich texts with relevant links within fresh SEO content. Nothing unusual so far. However, for a few months now - with one of our larger clients - we have been posting articles as pages on their site before submitting them to article syndication sites.

Our intention is to allow Google to ’spider’ the article in its place on the site, establishing it as the original source (or canonical version) rather than a copy. When it has been spidered we can see the new page appear in the search engine results, meaning Google has recognised the new page and added it to its index.

The idea is that when the article spreads via syndication onto various (and hopefully many) sites across the Internet, the one that was ’spidered’ first will be recognised by Google and attributed the most importance and better rankings. The delay we incorporate also means that the page will act as fresh content on the site (Google loves that fresh stuff) before it is duplicated (i.e. spread) elsewhere.

The results of our online viral marketing experiment are interesting. We’ve found that the site’s important landing pages improve considerably in the rankings, as we hoped, but the pages with the articles don’t rank well at all. Now this is not a problem for the client since the aim is to improve the landing pages, but it is curious that adding an article in this way helps the site, despite the page itself ranking poorly for the key phrases it contains. How come?

There are a number of things to consider, such as the depth in the site that new pages are placed, and Google wanting to provide a spread of search results from a variety of sources, as well as many other factors. But it’s still a mystery why fresh content in a well-established site (like our client’s) is ranked poorly when the same article ranks well elsewhere.

And this brings me around to talking about blogs. We’ve seen that Google indexes blog posts faster and checks blogs regularly; this makes sense because blogs are time-dependent – a kind of news, even. But more than this: the posts rank better too. It seems that a blog post will rank better than the same fresh content on a website, and we have seen the benefit of this with our SEO blogs. We should wonder why fresh content on a blog ranks so quickly while constantly added fresh content on a site does not.

So the question is this: is this just a fad? Will Google continue to rank blog posts generously? And what will come along next and take Google’s favour? We will watch and wait. If you know the answer, please drop a comment and share your thoughts.