Passing PageRank

Using "nofollow" for internal links.

[Kantro]

After reading the earlier posts about Matt Cutts "endorsing" the use of internal nofollow links to manage PageRank within a site, I am thinking about using this on my own site.

My homepage is really strong in that it receives the majority of the inbound links pointing my entire domain (right or wrong, that is the way I developed the site). There are about 100 or so internal pages of my site that do not have many backlinks from sources outside of my own domain, but almost all of each of those pages has a PR3 which is the same PR that my homepage has as well.

Now I know that PageRank is not the most important thing in the world for ranking in the SERP's, but in my industry it would definitely help to have a high PR on my homepage for link development purposes. AKA, there are some high quality sites out there that won't exchange links with sites under PR5.

So right now I am focusing on how to increase the PageRank of my homepage. My homepage itself links to almost all of the other 100-110 internal pages, and my question is this: Am I sacrificing PageRank on my homepage by passing it through to all 100-110 of the internal pages that I am linking to? If I were to add nofollow tags to all of those internal links from my homepage, I would no longer be passing PageRank to those internal pages. Would this increase the PR of my homepage? Or would it stay PR3? Where would that extra PR go if it was no longer passed through to those internal links from my homepage?

Thanks.

[CWebguy]

Kantro,

Pagerank is never "leaked", I believe this is a common misconception. You can never "lose" page rank, you can only pass it on (like casting a vote). If you want a higher page rank for your main page, you should create more links to it from your internal pages. I wouldn't cut off or "orphan" your internal pages as it seems like they would suffer and I don't believe you will gain any page rank to your main page from doing this.

Page rank is distrubuted based on the number of links on a page. So a page rank 5 with 5 links will cast a higher vote then a page rank 6 with 80 links (so we believe). I believe it's simple math. 5 links means each link gets 20% of that pages "vote", and 80 links means that each link gets only about 1.2% of that pages vote (because it has 80 links). But remember, you don't lose page rank. If you have a hundred links or one link on a page it will not change it's page rank. Use the formula to create more links or more weighted links to your home page and you should do fine.

This is to the best of my understanding, I could be wrong if someone wants to clarify.

Hope this helps! God Bless!

[edited by: CWebguy at 6:56 pm (utc) on Sep. 4, 2007]

[CWebguy]

For instance, try placing a link back to your home page in the header, footer and menu (total of three) on each page. That should help.

[Kantro]

CWebguy,

Thanks for the thoughts. I am currently linking to my homepage (in 3 spots) from every internal page, so that's good to hear.

The way I understand PageRank, however, is that it follows a probability distribution from 0 to 1. Check out Wikipedia's expanation:

[Assume a small universe of four web pages: A, B, C and D. The initial approximation of PageRank would be evenly divided between these four documents. Hence, each document would begin with an estimated PageRank of 0.25.

If pages B, C, and D each only link to A, they would each confer 0.25 PageRank to A. All PageRank PR( ) in this simplistic system would thus gather to A because all links would be pointing to A.

But then suppose page B also has a link to page C, and page D has links to all three pages. The value of the link-votes is divided among all the outbound links on a page. Thus, page B gives a vote worth 0.125 to page A and a vote worth 0.125 to page C. Only one third of D's PageRank is counted for A's PageRank (approximately 0.083).] - Wikipedia.

So to me it seems like PageRank can never be really "created", just past on from one page to the next. For instance, let's say I have a homepage that has absolutely no content, but it does have a bunch of high PR inbound links pointing to it (obviously this is not a real scenario). That page might have a PR5 b/c of the backlinks. But then lets say I insert 1 link on that homepage pointing to some other random site. That new page that I link to would get some of the PR that is passing through my homepage from its inbound links, maybe become a PR2. But since PageRank follows a probability distribution, the total sum of PageRank does not change, it is just reorganized between web pages as it is passed along through links.

I'm not referring to the toolbar PR values in all of this, but the actual distribution of PageRank that follows the probability distribution.

Does this make any sense at all?

[CWebguy]

Yes, I see what you are saying. The page you point to would be bumped up in page rank (to a 2 or whatever), but here is the part I think some people may be mistaken (from what I have learned). You can't lose any page rank by linking out, so in essense page rank is never lost.

Try killing links that go to pointless things (a lot of pages like blog pages have these), then the true links on your page will carry more "vote" back to your main page. If you are really desperate, I guess you could do a fourth link to the main page from each page, but this may be overkill, but that would in a sense boost that main page's rank (but drop the rest of your site pages). It's really complicated, and I hate to do the math (so I don't :-) but it seems like what you are doing is good so far. Only other thing is to increase incoming links to your site as this is the only way to truly increase page rank across whole site. I would definitly not orphan your pages though. For one your internal pages might be dropped from index (unless other websites point to your internals) and I believe you will lose more than you will gain by doing this. I guess the only way is just to get more links to your main page, wheter internal or external.

Again, I'm no expert but Hope this helps! Bless you!

[edited by: CWebguy at 7:47 pm (utc) on Sep. 4, 2007]

[Kantro]

Yah totally makes sense, your input is greatly appreciated.

I actually have just posted a new thread in this same category about nofollow links and I was wondering if I could get your take on that as well.

It might still be under review so I don't know if it's visible yet, but it's kind of a related question.

And yes, I know it's totally uncool to get all of my information from Wikipedia.

[edited by: Kantro at 7:50 pm (utc) on Sep. 4, 2007]

[tedster]

CWebGuy has it right - links don't diminish the PR of the page where they occur.

If a page links out to a page that doesn't link back, then that (small) amount of PR is not "re-circulated", if you will. The damping factor in the PR equation, plus the presence of so many other factors in the algorithm, makes this area not worth any play time, as far as I'm concerned.

What builds PR is backlinks from other pages.

[Kantro]

Interesting. So you're basically saying that there might be some slight effects but they are negligible?

[tedster]

Yes, I'd say there's a small mathematical truth here - just related to the circulation of PR. But it's minor, and nothing to get crazy about in the practical world, especially with internal linking. Write a new article - that can be a much better use of energy, IMO. It's still true that a link does not diminish the PR of the page where it occurs.

[CWebguy]

Yeah, I like to think of each individual page almost as it's own individual site (not sure if this is how google sees it), but anyways, I think it will be much more profitable to have a whole bunch of pages that have received page rank from your main page linking back to it, rather than having a whole bunch of your pages with no page rank linking back to it (your main page has page rank to give and can't lose page rank, so you might as well give it to some of your other pages!). This is why it is also very important to have good linking structure on your site with all the pages linking to one another (sitemaps are good for this).

Plus, one other thing I forgot to mention is that Google takes into account all the pages on your site and the pages that you are linking to in it's algorithm. So, if you have a site on widgets, and every page is something about widgets. Guess what? You will rank much better for widgets! If you cut these pages off, Google won't see them or won't consider them and you may loose whatever positive effect they may have on your site. Plus, I believe that it is possible that maybe larger sites rank a little better (content is king kind of thing).

We are also getting a little bit into the water of page rank manipulation, which may get you penalized or banned from Google. Anything not natural, which this is, should be avoided at all costs. Try not to worry to much about page rank. Like the previous poster said, work on some good content for your users to link to.

Anyone else?

[edited by: CWebguy at 9:14 pm (utc) on Sep. 4, 2007]

[Korrd]

Am I sacrificing PageRank on my homepage by passing it through to all 100-110 of the internal pages that I am linking to?

No

If I were to add nofollow tags to all of those internal links from my homepage, I would no longer be passing PageRank to those internal pages. Would this increase the PR of my homepage?

No

Or would it stay PR3?

Actually the PR of your homepage would decrease.

Where would that extra PR go if it was no longer passed through to those internal links from my homepage?

As I understand, in classical page rank during each iteration the outgoing page rank of pages with no outgoing links ("sinkhole pages") is assigned to a pool which is then divided between all the pages in the index. Google's version probably does something similar.

[Korrd]

CWebguy

If you are really desperate, I guess you could do a fourth link to the main page from each page, but this may be overkill, but that would in a sense boost that main page's rank (but drop the rest of your site pages).

My understanding has been that multiple links on a page to the same URL only count as one link.

[tomcatuk]

I don't see any issue with this and it's certainly my understanding that PR does "leak". That's clearly implied by Google's original PR algo (which I know, has no doubt changed since the information was made public - but I doubt by much, maybe just tweaks to the dampening factor) Do you want your "contact us" page in Googles' index? Probably not - chances of getting a high SERP or traffic are minimal at best, so any PR your contact page has is being "wasted". I've been thinking about this for a while but not got around to doing it, so I'm making this change now to guage it (which will, of course, take months!).

[steveb]

PR is not mysterious. If you have an index page and link to whitehouse.gov from it rather than linking to one of your own pages that links back to your index page (and other pages), you are lowering the PR of every page in your site or network of web properties.

This isn't "leaking". It is deliberately choosing to reduce the PR of your own pages. There could be plenty of reasons to do this, for instance, you just like whitehouse.gov.