Posts vs Pages and Rankings Differ Greatly

[GYMSN]

I use wordpress for most of my sites and generally have a post 'news' section.  What I've noticed is that just about every time a post will always rank much higher and much faster than a 'page'.

As long as I don't let it get buried in the news archives it continues to rank well, better than if I were to create a 'page'.

Is there any sort of reason this might occur?  I'd like to be able to just create 'pages' but at this point in time it makes no sense.

[Sean_Dawes]

How are your permalinks setup? Posts typically have a dated url structure which could add to their freshness for the site. It is also argued one of the things you should do with post permalinks is move away from that url structure if you want your post urls to rank for a period of time.

Outside of that it really has to do with the site. Are posts given any better visibility from an internal linking standpoint? Are their technical aspects different? title tags, h1 tags etc?

You need to write out every different aspect down and start thinking of what it can be.

[ShaMenz]

Hi GYMSN,

The most obvious explanation would be the content itself.

If you are following the general idea that pages are for "evergreen" content and posts are for "news", then it follows that the content in your posts tends to be much more topical than that in your pages.

If the content happens to also be timely (appears before others), fresh (up-to-date) and well written/good quality, then it should rank well and may even have a little potential for virality if very topical.

This would easily explain a significant difference in rankings.

Hope that helps,

Sha

[GYMSN]

Hi guys, thanks for the input.

Sean - The url structure is the same, except for it is in a /news/ folder and I tend to leave the path the same as the page title (for whatever reason that actually helps it even if its long).  But not using any time sensitive permalinks on any of the sites.

Sha - I definitely hear what you're saying, when we are the first to post about something it definitely continues to rank highly even after the competition comes in.  The thing is, we could put up a 'page' and it wouldn't.

Just seems to make no sense how google treats posts vs pages whether they're in G news or not.  I haven't tried it, but I'm pretty sure I could just post a 'post' with no content and it would rank good whereas a 'page' wouldn't get indexed likely.

[EGOL]

This could be cause by "query deserves freshness".

[GYMSN]

EGOL - Any way to tell google that for the 'pages'.    Or, do they just categorize 'posts' to deserve this and rank higher even if they don't deserve the freshness/news boost?

[EGOL]

Up until about six months ago I had a blog that was focused on news content.  The blog got several posts per day of very fresh news.  New posts on that blog would be indexed within moments and land on the first page of google - sometimes in difficult SERPs.  The rankings would stick for a while - not more than 24 to 48 hours and then quickly slip down the SERPs and disappear.

My guess is that google recognized the "newsy" nature of that blog (lots of queries with "news" as the keyword) and would give that blog short-term good rankings for queries that were getting a surge in volume.  Again, that is a guess. But I saw the same treatment that you described.

[GYMSN]

Right.  I was just thinking and I don't know if this is blackhat but because the news posts always rank better than pages, I'm going to test 301 redirecting a news post to a new page and see what happens.

Normally I would just leave it be, but I would like to set up navigational columns within these posts and can not do so because of their structure.

Basically:  Make a news post => let it rank for a week => 301 it to its permanent 'page' home.

This is not something I would normally do except for somewhat aged sites where not much new static content is added...

[EGOL]

Lots of my news posts were announcements of a much more detailed article that was posted on a "page" of my site.  Because my blog got eight to ten posts per day the post pages would be quickly buried deep in the blog.  The article pages were evergreen content.  So, I would redirect those posts to the article page.  I thought that it helped rankings.

I don't consider it blackhat because the newsy nature of the posts made them of "temporary value". We deleted and redirected thousands of post per year.