Writing review for internal links

[cheethebee]

I was reading writing review pages for each link on a links page will help improve page rank.

true?

[DerekH]

If you're referring to an article, what the article was suggesting was that a links page that linked both to external links and to pages that reviewed the external links would let only half as much PR leak off the links page to external sites.

The review pages capture the other half of the PR that is given to pages that are linked to.

The trick then is to route as much of that PR back into your website somewhere other than the links page. If the review page returns only to the links page, the majority of the PR siphons right back to the links page, which improves in PR, meaning more is lost to external sites.

The paper recommends linking the reviews page back to the home page or something similar.

Not only does it reduce the amount of PR you give away by 50%, but the presence of a few extra pages can also improve the PR of your own site (a page has a PR of 1, and a new page like a review page can be encouraged to give away 85% of that to somewhere else on your site).

The recursive nature of PR updates mean that the end result isn't quite as clean as my muddled explanation, nor the results quite as dramatic, as an Excel spreadsheet will quickly show, but it's certainly worthy of consideration - not only to safeguard your PR, but to add value to a visit, and perhaps persuade the visitor to read about your external link on your site, instead of leaving your site not to return...
DerekH

[edited by: Marcia at 10:34 am (utc) on Nov. 23, 2003]
[edit reason] Sorry, let's not do specifics please. [/edit]

[ciml]

Writing a review page for each link on a links page will help improve page rank, but generally it isn't anything to get excited about.

It is true that you can reduce PR leakage to external sites in the context of a single-iteration. As Derek points out, the recursive nature of PR updates make a difference. A large difference.

The rank source is negligible if you have any decent amount of PageRank. Even if you have a Toolbar PR2, you have massively more than the PageRank given to pages just for existing in Google.

The same goes for PR feedback loops in general, even perfect PR recycling has a small affect of about 1/2 a notch on the Toolbar. If you have a large site of any other external links, then this figure is much smaller.

If you want to analyse, measure and predict PR flow then factors like PR feedback loops are important to consider. In the real world, the practical implications of multi-iteration PR convergence and the abundance of PageRank make most PR-feedback advice quite unhelpful to the reader.