Can You "Sculpt" Page Rank With IFRAMES?

[Planet13]

Hi there, Everyone:

Suppose you had two links FROM Page A pointing TO Page B, and you wanted to maximize the Page Rank flowing from Page A to Page B.

Now suppose one link was a Text link that was in the content and had your preferred anchor text, but doesn't get many clicks by visitors.

The other was an image link, that gets lots of clicks.

Could you put the image link within an iframe so that google only "sees" the text link, which is the link you prefer google used in calcualting page rank?

Or would you do something else?

[tedster]

For now iframes still work that way. However, Matt Cutts mentioned a few months ago in a video that this may change in some situations at least.

So it's not the way I would go. Instead I would look at the coding for the entire page. If your visitors are making much use of the text link, maybe it shouldn't be where it currently is, you know?

Can you add text link to the thumbnail so that both image and text appear in a single anchor element? Does the image have an appropriate alt attribute?

[Planet13]

@ tedster:

Thanks for your reply.

If your visitors are making much use of the text link, maybe it shouldn't be where it currently is, you know?

I think you mean "aren't" instead of "are".

Hmmm.... It is in the first paragraph of content, so I am a little hesitant to move it. However, I will look to see if there is another part of the text where it reads better.

Can you add text link to the thumbnail so that both image and text appear in a single anchor element?

Yes, I do have some text in the anchor element that wraps around the thumbnail. My concern is that the text in that element is not optimized for anchor text - it is more of a sentence-long description of the picture (i.e., a caption), and not a two-worded keyword phrase (which would be optimum for anchor text).

the alt text for the image link is a description of the contents: "this is a photo of a widget base displaying the XYZ attribute." (where the words "widget base" would be my preferred keywords).

[tedster]

You're right about alt attributes. But imagine using some assistive browser technology like JAWS and hearing "This is a photo of..." over and over

this is a photo of a widget base displaying the XYZ attribute.

How about "widget base displaying the XYZ attribute"? I also don't think that exact phrase match in alt attributes is a big deal, especially if the entire phrase is there and in the correct word order.

< You're also right that I did mean "aren't">

[trakkerguy]

So you're assumption is that more pagerank, or link juice, passes on a link that gets more clicks, as opposed to a link that doesn't drive traffic?

I believe that seems likely, even more so post-Panda, and do plan my seo on that assumption. But haven't seen that theory discussed much.

[tedster]

I thought his assumption was that anchor text only flows through the first link on a page with several instances of the same link. Now that I read the post over again, I see he didn't actually say that.

[ken_b]

Wasn't there some discussion recently (within a few months) about adding a # to the additional links on a page to help avoid having them discounted?

[deadsea]

I have used javascript trickery to populate the link on the image from the text link. Googlebot doesn't see the image linked and users can still click on it. Something like:

<a href="otherpage.html" id="txtlnk">Important anchor text</a>
...
<a href="#" onclick="this.href=document.getElementById('txtlnk').href"><img src="compelling.gif"/></a>

My testing indicates that href="#" links are ignored by googlebot for pagerank calculation purposes.

[tedster]

Right - there's a significant technical difference between href="#" onclick... and href="page.html#identifier". It's the second one that appeared to pass anchor text influence.

[Robert Charlton]

There are a bunch of competing considerations here.

One question is whether the Reasonable Surfer model [seobythesea.com...] is at play here, and whether the Reasonable Surfer model affects which link the anchor text flows through.

Beyond that there's a question of Google's measures of user engagement, and how putting the most popular link on a page in an iframe might affect that (currently or in the future).

I don't think an iframe in this case is a good idea.

Also see....
Google's "Reasonable Surfer" - Bill Slawski popularizes the concept
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4145397.htm [webmasterworld.com]

[Robert Charlton]

And, PS to the above, it's probably not a good idea to obscure user involvement with your most popular link by javascript either.

I should add also that anchor text influence and PageRank are entirely different things... and that the tests regarding anchor text flow did not, as I remember, have anything conclusive to say about PageRank flow.

I don't believe that anybody has nailed the PR question for sure... ie, how Google treats PR flowing through multiple links from page A to page B.

[deadsea]

I believe I have nailed the question about multiple links and PR for sure. Multiple links to the same location only pass pagerank once. It works just like the anchor text influence that other folks here have measured.

[Robert Charlton]

deadsea - Thanks. A further question on that, though, is whether the denominator (in the division of PR calculation) is the total number of outbound links from page A or the total number of outbound links from page A to unique pages only.

[Planet13]

I thought his assumption was that anchor text only flows through the first link on a page with several instances of the same link.

Yes, that was exactly what I was asking.