Entry-Page Decentralization: A Server-Side Gauge of Topical Authority
When a corpus acquires topical authority, traffic stops arriving through the front door. On a local-service deployment, the homepage’s share of entry visits fell monotonically from 62.0% to 17.6% over five months while interior documents — cost guides, seasonal guides, geographic service pages — became the leading entries. Homepage entry share is proposed as a zero-cost, log-side gauge of authority cascade: no third-party tooling required.
Key Findings
- Homepage entry share by month: 62.0% → 33.8% → 30.4% → 23.2% → 22.1% → 17.6% — a monotonic five-month decline.
- The decline was not traffic loss: total visits grew over the same window while entries redistributed to 440+ interior documents.
- By month 5, individual interior documents (a chemical-safety guide, a regional cost guide) each captured 4–6% of ALL entries — rivaling the homepage’s own share.
- Newly added geographic documents entered the top-3 entry pages roughly 10 weeks after publication — a measurable content-to-traffic lag.
- The metric requires nothing but standard server logs. Any deployment can compute it monthly.
The metric
Search systems that trust a domain for a topic route users to the document that answers their query, not to the domain’s front page. Therefore the homepage’s share of entry visits is an inverse gauge of topical authority: as authority forms and the authority cascade spreads across the corpus, front-door share must fall while interior entries rise. This note documents the cleanest instance we have measured.
| Month | Homepage entry share | Leading interior entries |
|---|---|---|
| Month 1 (Feb) | 62.0% | Blog index, first articles appearing |
| Month 2 (Mar) | 33.8% | Commercial qualification guide enters top 3 |
| Month 3 (Apr) | 30.4% | Cost guides rising |
| Month 4 (May) | 23.2% | Regional cost-comparison guide takes #2 at 6.0% of ALL entries |
| Month 5 (Jun) | 22.1% | Seasonal and contact pages enter top 10 |
| Month 6 (Jul, partial) | 17.6% | Chemical-safety guide #2 (6.4%); new-region cost guide #3 (4.3%) |
Interpretation and controls
Two alternative explanations were checked and excluded. Homepage decay: homepage absolute entry counts held roughly steady — the share fell because interior entries grew around it. Bot inflation: the pattern persists in the human-weighted view; the leading interior entries correspond to the same documents earning clicks in Google Search Console over the identical window.
The 10-week lag between publishing a new regional document set and those documents entering the top-3 entry pages provides a planning constant: content shipped today is traffic in roughly one quarter. Deployments that need traffic by a known date must ship the corpus one lag-length in advance.
Terms Demonstrated in This Note
- Topical authority
- A search system’s learned trust that a domain answers an entire topic space, expressed by routing users directly to interior documents.
- Authority cascade
- The spread of ranking trust from a domain’s strongest documents outward across the corpus, observable as entry-point diversification.
Related Field Notes
FN-002: The Staircase Effect, Confirmed in Google’s Own Data · FN-007: Three Verticals, One Curve: The Ingestion Sequence Replicates