Forum Moderators: open
Suppose an index ranked top 10 in a competitive area. This page can be considered authoritative
containing the proper tokens and the proper links to related subjects from the same site/other sites.
What could happen with different inner pages/subjects:
a. Each page/subject is very well ranked for his own keyword, being part of the authoritative site; the internal page factors are secondary; the searcher is happy to find easy useful info, gg is happy to be relevant, the webmaster is happy too.
b. Some internal pages are not very well ranked; the subject is well covered, but the information is not presented in a contextual environment (i.e.: missing links to related subjects); other internal factors are secondary;
In this situation maybe google is right, and the mistake can be easily repaired
c. The internal pages are penalized, because of the internal page factors (i.e. keyword density, H1 etc) – in this case the “build with user in mind” principle is not google’s goal; it is most important to punish the OOP, punishing in the same time the surfers, vanishing important information because of artificial arguments. In this case the authoritative concept is superfluous: how can a site be authoritative without being composed by authoritative related info?
IMO this last case is the most frequent after Austin.
If a page covers a subject, but is dropped, being preceded by hundreds of non related pages, just because of OOP, and this is the new algo philosophy, then give me a break. I think it is about time to forget about google.
I think it is important for this page rank to come from a combination of many links instead of just a handful of high PR links.
And beyond PR, there's topical relevance to look at. Teoma is a good read on that, with their concepts about web communities.
So IMHO if you want to be seen as authority / target you need to have relevant pages for the theme you want to rank well:
- one theme only on that page
- inbound links (as many as possible) from
--- external pages about the same theme (the more external ones the better)
--- internal pages about the same theme: The more content on the site the better. If you can't beat the competitors with good content on the theme you rather chose a sub-theme and concentrate on it. (Like that you might get on top of the main theme also)
--- pages that rank well for the keyphrase you are targeting
--- directories / hubs
- off-site outbound links on that page seem not to be that important (unless you want your page to be seen as directory / hub which is also a way to rank well)
- on-site outbound links to other pages on the site about this theme will help (show you are an expert on that theme)
- PageRank of the page is still important (but only a part of the algo)
- on page optimization is important (but don't overdo it...)
If you don't follow one of those points it doesn't mean that you don't rank well. I am sure there will be people who find an exception for every point mentioned above. But so far I could always find a reason for those exceptions.
