Back in 2005, a group of computer scientists carried out a now-famous study of the way visits to a website fall over time. These guys looked at the traffic to a Hungarian news site and found that it decayed as a power law.This, they said, has a straightforward explanation: the amount of traffic is simply a reflection of people’s browsing habits.
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Today, Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury at the University of California, Los Angeles put forward another idea. They point out that the traffic to some websites does not fall with time and that the previous theory cannot explain this. Their evidence comes from traffic to one of their own sites which follows a kind of punctuated equilibrium, rising and falling sharply over time as other sites point to theirs.This phenomenon clearly flies in the face of the earlier theory but Simkin and Roychowdhury say it can be easily explained.Their idea is that the popularity of a webpage is simply a function of how easily it can be accessed: pages near the top of a website are easier to find than those further down or on other pages.
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27591/