Battelle points to this post by Steven Johnson. Mr. Johnson just had a boy, named him Dean, and asked his friends to point to that post. Battelle asks because the post was in the top 10 for the search [dean] for a while, and then it wasn’t.
By the time I checked today, it was back in the top 10. Bear in mind that rankings do change all the time, especially for bloggy items. One common reason is when multiple people blog about something, it’s often on the front page of their blogs, and front pages typically have the highest PageRank. As stories scroll off the front page of peoples’ blogs, there’s often a dip in ranking because the links tend to be from deeper pages with lower PageRank.
There can be other reasons why a page temporarily drops, too. I saw at least one day when we weren’t able to include the page in the index (could have been that the server was unreachable for a short time). When a server is down for a short while, we normally recrawl the pages again the next time, and then the page often returns to roughly where it was before. Our webmaster console in Sitemaps is a great place to see errors like that.
On the other hand, is that really the post you’d like Dean-watchers to find? Can you imagine when Dean is 13, and mortified that one of the top results is baby pictures of him? “Dad, you might as well have posted picture of me in a bathtub! Why do you always have to embarrass me?”
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/debugging-de…
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