Google Internal PageRank ( Page Rank) Issues

google page rank, pagerank, internal page rank, pagerank, includes

[piconsulting]

I am confused about what affects the page rank of internal pages on the sites I promote. (Pages other than the home page). Specifically, I have the following questions;

1) Does linking to your pages with relative .../page2.html as opposed to absolute www.homepage.com/page2.html affect page rank?

2) If your navigation is an include, does this hurt the page rank of your internal pages? In other words does Google see an include as being linked from one file in your site or from every page that include is on?

3) Do session variables hurt page rank? If one of my pages is /index.phtml?session=1233 and the pagerank with the session string is 2 but if I remove the session string so that the url is index.phtml then the page rank is 4 should I be concerned at all? How can I avoid this issue

Thanks for any help that can be given on any of the issues above.

[AmericanBulldog]

piconsulting, welcome to webmasterworld.

I'll try and answer these for you.

1)Relative or absolute links should not affect the passing of PR within your site, however there are other reasons why you may wish to use absolute links.

2)If your navigation is in a SSI this is not an issue, it happens at the server, g-bot only sees the rendered page. There are spider simulators if you want to see what spiders see when they visit your page.

3)You would want to use static rather than variable addresses as some engines don't do a great job at indexing pages with lots of variablew. It should have no affect on PR, just on getting your whole site indexed.

[piconsulting]

Thanks AmericanBulldog,

On your answer to the relative links I am still unsure. Are you sure?

When I do a search at google for "link:www.competitor.com/page2.html" it shows up with alot of internal pages from that competitor's site as links to that page. However when I do the same search for my site "link:www.mysite.com/page2.html" none of my internal pages show up as linking to that page.

The only differnce I can see is that it appears that my competitor uses absolute links while we use relative links. Is the link: search showing me something different than page rank?

[MrCrowley]

Probably because of your use of session? If you use a session variable in the link, Google probably won't index it. If the page you are searching for is html, it will be indexed, but if your other pages that link to it are session-sensitive, they won't be indexed so Google won't show them... by extension it won't show you either if they link to other pages in your site.

[steveb]

1) Yes, of course. www.site.com/page1.html and site.com/page1.html are linked to differently so they have different pagerank.