Organising an alphabetical index

Maintaing PR of target phrases

[Iguana]

I have a website about widgets that is organised as an alpabetical hierarchy e.g. # A B C .... leading to an index page for each letter. That gives me 27 links on my main index page. I have now reached the stage that I have more than 100 links on some of the letter index pages.

Apart from the Google recommendation that you shouldn't have more than 100 links on a page, the index structure is also becoming unwieldy for my users. I'm not sure what to do now - if I split up the letter index pages into groups of 50 (Sa-Si Sl-Sp Sq-Sz) then the second and third pages will get lower PR and the pages they point to will drop far down the SEPRS.

Has anyone got any thoughts as to how I reorganise my index pages (or should I just leave them as they are)? Experience has shown me that the more evenly spread my PR is, the better results I get.

[Imaster]

I have got a similar problem. Each of my alphabets have about 200 links and wish to break them up into subalphabets, but haven't come up with a concrete solution.

I was thinking of breaking an alphabet (Sa-Si, Sl-Sp, Sq-Sz) and then linking these subpages directly from my main page. So it would look like

Index
- Aa-Ad
- Ae-Am
- An-Az
- Ba-Bd
....

Anyone has tried breaking long alphabetical indexes?

[jcoronella]

Why not page 1, 2 and 3 for 'A' etc, with 50 links per page? That is, have a more or next/previous link. If your motive is to emphasize certain pages over the other, the organization would be different.

The more I think of it, the more I like the Aa-Ad that you suggest, with 'W-Z' for letters with fewer entries.

If you heavily interlink your 2nd and 3rd tier pages, you will get a fairly even PR distro, although you will have to stagger the interlinking somehow so you don't exceed 100 links.