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This may have been discussed previously but I couldn't find a definitive answer to these questions on Google's page rank and linking.
1. Does anyone know if Google's link algo will treat links from a googlebot-visible forum with the same weight as a standard content page on a Web site. Forums are often themed, but they can cover numerous topics, so I am not sure if this complicates things.
2. If one Web site (or forum) has multiple links to the same target site, how does Google treat it? As one link or more? Does this affect Page Rank. If the links are on different pages and point to different pages on the target site, does this change things?
3. Some forums like to hotlink images without linking to the site's HTML pages - does Google treat this as a link?
4. I read that outward links can decrease your page rank. Is this true and how does it work?
DM
Yes I too was in search of valuable answer to this, as I have also considered this.
But I think if this happens to be ture then there wont be any legitimacy of Links and PR from G piont of view. As in forum I can place link to my own site in more than one thread, to gain PR in G?
Any thoughts on this?
Regards.
Yes, PR "bleed" does exist. The page giving an outbound link does not, of course, lose any PR itself. But if it has--as essentially every page in a site does--links back to other pages within its site, then the PR it can pass to those other "cousin" pages is diminished somewhat by the outbound link.
A page can pass, it is widely believed, 85% of its own PR; but that amount is necessarily divided up amongst all the other pages it links to. If, for example, it links only to its site's front page, it passes all of its available-to-be-shared PR to that page. Now add one link on it to an outside page and the PR it passes to its own index page is cut exactly in half.
Whether site PR "bleed" is a serious matter, to be dealt with, or trivial, is a matter on which opinions are diverse--which is silly, because it is exactly calculable. You may not know your page's PR (those quantized digits are only vague handwaves at true PR, which could be, for a so-called "PR 5" page, anywhere from 4.5001 to 5.4999, and the relation is geometric, not arithmetic), but whatever it may be, you can certainly figure out how many links there are on the page and how many are internal and how many external.
External links can be hidden--there are many commonly available tools for the task--but hiding links raises deep and serious ethical questions.
Am I to understand that your site has seen a slump in the SERPs and you're wondering if it's your forum? Well, even if not, I recently noticed a slump across mine and am almost certain I found the problem to be my forum. Here's what I found and did.
I use a heavily hacked phpBB to show mod_rewrite urls (/viewtopic/23552.html type thing). However, I missed the fact that that little post icon multiply links to pages too. This could look like I'm running some sort of duplicate content machine, with lots of different urls linking to identical content! :shock: So I removed that for users who are NOT logged in. While I was there I removed siggys, all the other buttons, nearly stripped it clean right down to the content for anyone (including, crucially, bots!) who is not logged in. Then I still had the problem of users linking to /viewtopic.php?t=23552 from within it. So I then had to rewrite what they saw too, and also robot out a lot of the other possibilities in robots.txt.
In the end I am left with a forum that shows just the content of posts (including the odd link thrown in, but not repetitively like a siggy) which I think is a far better situation regarding google and her associates ;)
Results. Well, it could be coicindence (although I am much happier with my forum now anyway), but I have seen a marked increase in traffic some 2 weeks after making all these changes, somewhere approaching what it was before google finally decided that my forum was a 'bad place'.
