tedster - 10:47 am on Jul 1, 2008 (gmt 0)

If every page has essentially the same large collection of anchor text, that blurs the relevance signal of the page. I mentioned this to a Yahoo VP at PubCon, and his eyes rolled back. He said, essentially "spread that idea around. Those menu heavy pages are a major headache for us."

My point is also that we can focus PageRank where it really matters, not spread it so thin that nowhere stands out as a key page on the website. There's a parallel in physical world retail shops (I have decades in that kind of management) where you want to put everything in the front of the store and at eye level. But of course, in the physical world, you just can't do that. So you learn, you do split tests, you see what the best performers are in your inventory.

And that's part of what I like to do with a website. We know there are certain things that render well on the visible page but are not really spider friendly. I think there are parallels with site structure, too. Too big a manu and you can easily make an algorithm ask "where's the structure?"

Our pages can be like our kids - every one of them seems precious and we want the whole world to love all of them -- but it ain't going to happen. We can squeeze so tight trying to force the results we visualize that we crush what is good. To a visitor, a huge assortment of links can come across as almost desperate.

Another analogy I make sometimes is inviting people to your house for a dinner party. You don't tell them to raid the fridge and suit themselves. No, you prepare dishes, you coordinate courses. You create a "menu"!

All I can do is report on my experiences, and yes, I am biased by my own past. But this approach, as I said, has helped at least some successful websites to become more successful. So I feel there's something to it. I'm not just building castles out of sand here, there's some real data, real experience of several years that I'm trying to get deeper into.

And when it comes to PR circulation, all PR does not come from the home page. Great inner pages can attract lots of backlinks and become stars on their own. If you notice those pages, then their links can be great sources of PR circulation, too.