how would you spend a link budget?

best way to use reciprocal links!

[soapystar]

Ok, suppose you had 500 inbound links and you could place them to any page of your site, if your goal is to get the best boost to your site for pr and keywords how would you "SPEND" your budget? For instance spreading them over several pages and getting the keywords exactly right for each page will boost your overall use of several keywords. We all know that you lose 1 pr point as you drop into a deeper directory so what if you had the links going to middle direcory pages? That way they would give out pr up and down reducing the pr loss for going two deirectories deep since now they are only 1 deep either side of the middle directory. How many links would you aim to get to each page to get a significant pr boost? lets assume incoming pr links are all pr4.

[lazerzubb]

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))
PageRank formula.

And as far as i know only Google employees know the real value of how much PageRank you drop for each lever, even though many speculate of numbers, and some are probably very close (like ciml here for example)

I think you have to decide how you want to spend it yourself, it depends on which keywords you target, how many pages the site have, how many keywords you are targetting, but yes i would probably spend it more on the "non-index" page, becuase if it's a good site, most people will probably link to the index page, so it wouldn't be that hard to get a good PageRank value for it.

If you don't think it will get many inbound links to the index page, i would also include it in your list to place link to.

Related thread:
Crosslinking, Interlinking and Reciprocal Linking (May 2, 2002) [webmasterworld.com]

[ciml]

I differ slightly from lazerzubb here. If the phrases with most potential reward and competition are targeted high in the site structure, then that's where you need the most PageRank. Those high levels should then let the PageRank trickle down to the less competitive or rewarding pages.

On the other hand, there's a growing view that link text from a different domain carries more weight, so from that point of view you might want to spread the links around.

> some are probably very close

Ssssh! (they might change the numbers if they realise;))