Since we launched the new Top Posts Widget, one question that’s come up a few times has been about PostRank scores for posts on the website as opposed to PostRank scores in the widget. Sometimes the same post will show two slightly different scores.
As far as our user community understands, PostRank is PostRank, so the score for any given post should be the same regardless of where the post appears, right? Not necessarily.
Websites are not static. How publishers write, what topics they address, and how many readers they have changes over time. PostRank analysis takes the dynamic nature of publishing and reader engagement with these posts into account. Ranking a post is always about context.
The widget is about showcasing your best posts. The system behind how the widget works analyzes sites’ content over a longer time frame than the website does. This is because it’s unlikely that all the best content you’ve ever published appeared in the last month, for example.
At the same time, however, it’s not very likely that content you published five years ago is still the most relevant to your readers either, so analysis for the widget doesn’t include every post you’ve ever published.
The reason that a post might appear in the Top Posts list on the widget with a lower PostRank score than on the website is because of the effect of other posts’ performance on analysis and scores.
For example, say several months ago average engagement for one of your blog posts looked like this:
But time has passed and your blog has grown more popular. You have more readers and they engage more with your content. The average engagement for one of your posts now looks like this:
Because of how your recent posts have been performing in terms of drawing reader engagement, the recent post is only average. But several months ago it would have demonstrated unusually high engagement and would have ranked a 10.
PostRank analysis for the Top Posts widget first determines what posts have the highest engagement. Then it analyzes those posts to rank them against each other. The PostRank score for a post in the widget reflects its ranking against the “best of the best”. That’s why it can be lower than a PostRank score on the website, but still be a Top Post.
PostRank scores on the website and widget are answering fundamentally different questions. The website PostRank scores answer: “How well have I been engaging my readers lately?” The Top Posts widget PostRank scores answer: “What’s my best recent content up to now, and how well do these Top Posts rank relative to each other?”
Of course, reader engagement tends to increase gradually over time, and publishers’ most engaging content is published only intermittently. So the Top Posts listed in the widget tend to change less frequently than website PostRank scores do.