Best Way to Distribute PR

Does it mean removing "site map" off main page?

[Helpmebe1]

Hey, Just curious what peoples thoughts are. I am trying to figure out the best way to distribute PR through out the site. All links come into the index page, or what I refer to as the front page of the site. On the front page I have links to the main sections of the site but also to the "site map". The site map is a generated page of 2800 links (a link to each page in the site). With googles ability and really all search engines to spider pages, I think this link on the front page is then distributing the PR to all 2800 pages, well which does no justice to any of them since their are so many pages. Is it best to take this link to the site map off the front page of the site and just links to the main sections and assume the search engines will find the site map page and include all the pages in the engines. These main sections are heavy hitters which I atleast think would be much better off getting all the PR they can, so by removing the site map, it would then channel the PR to these sections which would help alot? Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance...

[bhartzer]

Personally, I would split up the site map into sections and then have several sitemap pages.

After all, the site map should really be there for the visitors to find areas of your site. So, why would you make it extremely difficult and overwhelming for them to see one page with 2800 links?

[Mohamed_E]

From the Google Information for Webmasters [google.com] Guidelines:

Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.

Also:

Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

A site map with 2,800 links is of little use to your users, and ultimately Google likes things that are useful to users.

[seekanddestroy]

That's interesting Mohamed, nice Google info forward, however in terms of actual results it would infer that the Google algo is 'fond' of multiple site map type pages if more than 100 links are there.

Does anyone have the mathematical argument that agrees with this re: Google basic PR algo?

Even if not, it's not beyond the realms of reality to speculate that the Goog algo can have an additional line or two to factor this - ultimately the goal of Google is to be a helpful to users as possible.

However, that said, from an info architecture point of view you could get the same user friendliness with same page anchors.

Mmm, my school's out on this one...

Seek.

[Helpmebe1]

Hey, thanks for the info.. this is actually a yahoo store, which automatically generates this one page with all the links.. nothing I can do about it. Just wondering if I should put a link to it on the front page of the site, or keep the link to it off the front page off the site so that the PR does not go into this sitemap which would have 2800 links on it. Is it better to keep this link off and just put links to the main sections in the pages so that the PR flow through to those important sections and nothing else?

If I do that, then the site would have no link to this "sitemap", is that so bad?

Thanks!

Chris

[Hobbyist]

Sadly i have more then 100 links on some pages. Maybe below 100 if i exclude anchors and internal pages.

Will this be a big problem?

I also need to figure out what this "distribution" of pr means, my index page is PR 5, can good distribution of pr get it to 6?

[Giacomo]

Deepbot is crawling URLs on one of our sites off of a single page with 450+ links on it. We're at about 290 URLs right now (and rising fast!).

[Giacomo]

I also need to figure out what this "distribution" of pr means, my index page is PR 5, can good distribution of pr get it to 6?

The linking structure influences the distribution of PR on internal pages of your site. Some of that PR can also "feed back" to the home page (provided that you have links on internal pages pointing back to the home page, of course). One particular situation where you'll want to have the 'Home' link on every single page of your site is where internal pages have back links from the rest of the web.

However, since I don't know what the current linking structure and back links of your site are, it's impossible for me to say whether an optimized linking structure would be able to raise your home page PR from 5 to 6.