I’ve always stressed the importance of writing a lot of content if you want to maximize traffic. You can read more about it in a previous article The most important factor. While content is important to getting traffic, simply adding more content forever will not lead to more traffic indefinitely. Eventually you will hit a plateau and adding more content to your site won’t help traffic.  In this article I focus on how and why pagerank becomes important when you hit this “content plateau”.

So right now you might be writing tons of unique content and everytime you write a new blog post, you get more search engine traffic.  You probably don’t know a thing about backlink building, but you do know how to write.  So you just keep writing and you get more search engine traffic as a result.  Search engine traffic is proportional to how much new content you have, but only for new sites. Eventually there will come a point that your search engine traffic will plateau no matter how much content you write.

Why does writing more content not help anymore?

The answer is in pagerank and how google anyalyzes it. You see on the main blog page your articles have the most pagerank. Over time as the old blog posts get pushed into the archives, the link juice gets diluted and they will have low pagerank. This is why webmasters are always nofollowing links, so they don’t “bleed” link juice to unnessary outgoing or internal links. So what happens is once you get about 3 or 4 levels deep in the archives, chances are that post won’t rank high anymore in Google.

The only solution is to increase pagerank. I found that a blog full of unique well written articles in a noncompetitive market can only get away with about 200 articles before it plateaus on a Pagerank 4 on a new domain. You simply have to let time give your site better authority, so everything will rank higher. Increasing your pagerank will also help spread the link juice deeper into your archives.

Think of your content as your base. The only way to get it “out” and near the top of the search engines, is to have a highly authoritive high PR site. Your most recent posts will always have the best rankings in Google do to the distrubution of pagerank and page age, but you can certainly help bring your older posts out by increasing your sites overall rank.