Cross Linking within your own website

Does it improve PR?

[ir8Rtist]

SEO Newbie question:

If you cross link pages in your website heavily, does it improve your PR or simply more evenly distribute your PR throughout your site?

[doc_z]

Depending on your link structure, you can distrubute your PR either flat (equally) over your pages or in a hierarchical way. The total amount of PR (sum of all internal pages) is always the same. (As long as the transferred PR to other sites is unchanged.)

Heavily cross linking will lead to a flat distribution of PR, i.e. all pages of your site will get nearly the same PR. This is a good strategy, if you have numerous important pages (e.g. different product pages). On the other hand, if you are optimizing just for a single page, a hierarchical structure without cross linking would be the better way.

[SlyOldDog]

However, you can create pagerank by buiding more pages....

[coolasafanman]

i think it really just depends on how big your site is. If it's just a few pages then it probably doesn't matter much. If you have arbitrarily 50 pages or more I would go with a hierarchy. Hundreds or thousands - no question you need a hierarchy. Besides the whole PR issue, it also makes it easier for humans to navigate your site.

Following the advice that Google puts out of no more than 100 links/page, you would be forced into a hierarchy at this level as it is. But that's a good thing.

[ir8Rtist]

Thanks for the info. Basically I have the site segmented and divided by product and I also have segmentation divided by business level (i.e. Enterprise solutions, SOHO, etc.) I have links the the copy of these pages linked to products that are mentioned in the copy. Sounds like I'm on the right track though.

[bhartzer]

I highly suggest that you take a look at some of the Pagerank calculator(s) that are available. You can find them by searching for 'pagerank calculator' at your favorite search engine.

Using a pagerank calculator allows you to look at the internal linking structure of a website and determine the relationships between internal links.

I got a lot out of using one of these, as I was able to understand how the internal linking can influence my own internal pagerank.