Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have always known that the PR5 pages were there and was deliberatley not using site wide links as an experiment to see if they would hold their PR during jagger and now bigdaddy. It seems they have all held the same PR for 7 months or so.
I am more concerned with giving the 5 pages better ranking for their respective keywords, but would also like to know about the chances of a PR bump.
Thanks.
I suspect any PR increase for the five pages would be minor. :)
Kaled.
... and was deliberatley not using site wide links as an experiment to see if they would hold their PR during jagger and now bigdaddy.
A page will not loose PR when linking out to other pages. As mentioned before, at least one link is necessary from each page to prevent PR waste. However, the pagerank of a page will be shared between the pages it links too and the more links on a page, the more the PR value distributed via each link will be dilluted.
Be carefull with many index pages, sitemaps etc. I have done some simulations with page rank distributions in a site with different internal linking schemes and I found it astonishing how many PR a sitemap consumes when it is linked to by all pages, often more than 15%. This is waste of PR in most cases because sitemaps and index directories won't show up in most queries because of lack of relevance.
I am not so concerned about the PR, but more so 95 PR5 pages boosting the relevance of the product pages for their targeted keyword.
Example:
Lets say I have a page about blue widgets, and it sits at #11 on google. I point 50 pages within the same domain, that have a PR5 and are all relevant to each other linking to the general blue widgets page that I want in the top 10 for blue widgets.
In an instance like that and IF the content was good etc.. will that increase my chances of getting on page 1?
I may not be explaining myself right, but I speculate if it was an external (not from the same domain) link, it would hold higher values for my situation. I always hear a lot about linking and it seems that its mostly about good PR links from other domains, but strong PR pages within a domain linking to a small group of pages is something that I want to learn more about because i have another domain that has a couple of hundred PR5 and PR6 subpages that I would consider doing this too as well.
Thank you everyone for posting, I appreciate it greatlly.
To make them more important I would try and make a steeper triangle - home page, leads to 5 key pages, leads to the other 95 product pages, leads to more pages below each product page (reviews, feedback, related articles etc)
That way you clearly identify in your structure the 5 most important pages. You also make sure you have an text link back to the level above - something like:
home >> blue widgets >> blue widget number 2
That way users know where they are, and Google has the required link back up the structure.
You will probably lose the PR5 rating on the 95 pages if you put them further down the structure (they'll drop to PR4), but the 5 important pages will be clearly identified as important, and should rank better.
Thats if I understood you correctly. And it's only my opinion, which I could generalise as "build a logical structure" for your content, and add as much useful content on the lower levels as you possibly can to boost the higher levels.
"I think its likely that your PR5 pages have that PR because they are the next stage down the tree from the PR6 home page. That is almost automatic, and so the pages won't necessarily rank well."
Are there other possible things that may cause this to occur, besides that? It could be likley, but I have other webistes with a similar link structure and they do not get that kind of PR from the "next stage down" concept. In fact I have some site that have a stronger PR on subpages as opposed to the home page, and the home page initially had a higher PR.
You want a page to have higher PR, aim links at it. Aim links at it from pages with higher PR. Remove uneccessary links from pages that link to the page you want to boost.
Steve, in my initial post, I was asking more so about how it would affect rankings for target keywords. You are right, it is not the point. I am only trying to learn about linking, and what affects it has on PR. My primary concern has everything to do with content and I feel that because i put so much effort on content, that I may be lacking in proper link structure. I just want to learn more about optimal linking within the same domain for end users and google.
Here are a couple links to pages that I found especially helpful:
[iprcom.com...]
[#*$!.net...]
(Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with either of these sites.)
Chris
"If you give outbound links to other sites then your site's average PR will decrease"
Here is my question.
If I have 10 outbound links on my homepage (which has the highest PR)
Will I be losing more pr than
If I put the same 10 outbound links on a lower PR page?
Another way of asking this would be this.
Would I lose the same percent of PR on either page?
In that case wouldn't I lose less total PR if I put the links on the low PR page than if I put them on the High PR page?
If you put the 10 outbound links on a lower page, you will lose less PR of the site in general for sure. A clear example of this is that noone will link to you from their home page unless they're paid for it (or mad), but they wil happily throw in a link in some useless "links" page down the bottom of their strucure
Are there other possible things that may cause this to occur, besides that? It could be likley, but I have other webistes with a similar link structure and they do not get that kind of PR from the "next stage down" concept. In fact I have some site that have a stronger PR on subpages as opposed to the home page, and the home page initially had a higher PR.
I know sites that have stronger "level 2" pages than their "home pages" as well. But this is because in a sense these are the most important pages, and will have external links pointing at them, as well as structure below them that denotes their importance in the site. Often these inbound links are deliberately targeted at these pages.
On the subject of outbound links losing PR, I would like to add that this doesn't mean necessarily losing positions. Linking out to important related sites is a strong strategy in Google. Lots of sites do well as they are seen as useful resources to users, pointing the user at other sites related to their search, but conecting these links to their own content.
What do I mean by this? I mean that linking out reinforces your relevance to the search if it is on target and especially if it is to an important resource, and so boosts your results, even if in theory it loses PR
Think about this - Google wants you to link out, otherwise its whole algorythm would crumble. It won't punish youunless you link out to unrelated rubbish
PR is only one part of the equation.
A clear example of this is that noone will link to you from their home page unless they're paid for it (or mad)
Kaled.
I have a homepage that has 5 links on it going out to other pages within the same domain. In summary, the 5 links are:
Product Category 1
Product Category 2
Product Category 3
Contact Us/About Us
Detailed Ordering Information
We had multiple problems with customers who found us through the 'Detailed Ordering Information' page via Google - so much so that we put a "noindex,nofollow" on it, which removed it from Google. That way, only customers who come through "proper" channels are able to access it.
Question:
Am I losing 20% of the PR that the homepage dispenses by linking to one "noindex,nofollow" page out of 5 total? Or does Google give all the home page PR to the 4 "index,follow" pages?
Am I losing 20% of the PR that the homepage dispenses by linking to one "noindex,nofollow" page out of 5 total? Or does Google give all the home page PR to the 4 "index,follow" pages?
You are losing definitely PR by using "noindex,nofollow". The nofollow argument tells the spider to not sipder or count the links on that page, so that page is not able anymore to distribute its PR to other pages. The best way is to change it to "noindex,follow", which allows PR distribution FROM the unindexed page to other pages. For PR distribution it doesn't matter if the page is indexed in the search engine or not. I have hunderds of pages with the "noindex,follow" tag that have decent PR (2 to 4) but which I removed from the index to prevent duplicate content penalties.
The next thing you should consider is to use the new rel="nofollow" tag in all the links to the page you want to be removed from the index. This stops PR distribution TO that particular page and should distribute the available PR of the homepage to the 4 remaining visible pages.
With the above mentioned adaptions to your site, most--if not all--of the PR should be distributed amongst the remaining visible pages of your site.
Which again goes back to the simple answer. Yes, linking more to your important pages helps rankings.
I can't imagine why you'd want to stop users finding your site even if they come through the "improper channel" - wouldn't they then perhaps just head for the home page? Anyway, I guess you know the answer to that one.
Perhaps you could integrate the Detailed Ordering Information into the product pages? Then you wouldn't need the page or the link, but the content might still come up in Google, leading your user instead to an actual product page. Just an idea.
But I'm wondering if I should put rel="nofollow" in my links to Amazon books. I always list my references at the end of each article and link them to Amazon. Could the nofollow help reduce link leak?
How does it fit into the link code? Would
<a href="http://www.widgets.com" rel="nofollow"> be right?
Would <a href="http://www.widgets.com" rel="nofollow"> be right?
Yes, that should work. I have used the rel="nofollow" on a number of affiliate links some time now and have seen no negative results in SERPs positions etc. I think it is the use that Google and others intented when they introduced it. An affiliate link is interesting for the visitor, but not for the search engines and the nofollow prevents PR to artifically flow to the www.widgets.com website. I link to www.widgets.com because of the product that is for sale, not because I like the www.widgets.com itself.
To come back on the proposal I made a few posts ago about rel="nofollow" to a page on your own site: although it should work, I don't use it myself so I don't have any first hand experience on its positive or negative effects.
From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn't a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.
They seem to be giving rel="nofollow" their approval.
