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By this, I mean if I have a page with keyword 'widgets' and every one of my sites 200+ pages link to it with the keyword 'widgets' in the link text, that will imporve its SE Position & PR?
For the current PR algorithm used by Google you'll get the maximum PR for the home page with just one internal page. (Obviously, I'm ignoring the fact that additional pages might lead to additional incoming links.) There are other linking structures with more pages leading to the same PR for the home page but for 'normal' linking structures the PR of the home page will decrease when adding internal pages. However, having just one page is a maximal waste of PR.
Of course, there are many advantages in adding pages to a site. These positive effects will not only compensate the disadvantage mentioned above but also lead to an improve in the SERPs in most cases.
By this, I mean if I have a page with keyword 'widgets' and every one of my sites 200+ pages link to it with the keyword 'widgets' in the link text, that will imporve its SE Position & PR?
I can't comment on whether it will improve SE ranking, other than to say I think it probably will.
But I have to say, from my experience, if you put a link on say 100 subpages of your site to another subpage of your site, that second subpage will get a boost in PR. The amount of boost depends upon how many other links are on the 100 subpages and what the PR is of the 100 subpages.
I thought this was common knowledge. Am I missing something here?
I think doc_z is speaking of links to the home page, while it's not clear if that's what consolepassion means.
Beth
... if you put a link on say 100 subpages of your site to another subpage of your site, that second subpage will get a boost in PR.
That's correct. By adding those links you change the distribution of PR. The PR of some pages is increased (e.g. the target page) while the PR of other pages is decreased.
Home Page (Page0) -> Page1 -> Page2 -> .... -> Page10000 -> ....
Sum total of all PR will be (assume PR of home page is X and the damping factor is d)
X + d*X + d*d*X + d*d*d*X + .......
= X / (1-d)
if d is say, 0.8 (80%)
it comes out to X/(1-.8) = X/.2= 5*X
So we are able to increase the sum of PR of pages in the site from X to 5X. By changing the link stucture, some pages can get more and some can get less, and the home page generally gets the most since it is linked to most.
Without thinking much about it, I believe that if one wants to maximize the PR of the home page, each page except the home page (home page should have just one link) should have two links - one to the home page and one to the next page. Bad from SEO point of view but good from ego's point of view.
I think of something like a spreadsheet (so it's sorteable) which lists page name or URL in one field and the PR in the next field.
Any ideas?
X + d*X + d*d*X + d*d*d*X + .......
This is correct if there is no 'self-contribution' of 1-d for each page.
So we are able to increase the sum of PR of pages in the site from X to 5X.
Independent from the linking structure and from the number of pages, you will always end with a total PR of X / (1-d) as long as there are no outgoing links and no 'dead ends'. (As already said this statement is only valid for the case that there is no self-contribution.)
Without thinking much about it, I believe that if one wants to maximize the PR of the home page, each page except the home page (home page should have just one link) should have two links - one to the home page and one to the next page.
No, the optimal linking structure for a high home page (assuming that self links doesn't count) is linking all pages from the home page while all internal pages just have one link back to the home page. This yields X / (1- d^2) for the home page independent from the number of pages.
Thanks. It just means that we cannot generate lots of PR by creating lots of pages or even boost up PR of a certain page by much by using clever linking. I think it is time to get more inward links. ;)
That's certainly not true, which gets backs to the topic. You can dramatically effect the PR and search ranking of your internal pages depending on how you link them. A page with one link from one of your pages will do less well than a page that has 200 similar links to it.
"So, if you have pages that don't have to be ranked well (such as "about us" or "Contact us" pages) and have links to some target pages, it will redistribute the PR to the target pages AND will increase rankings in SEs."
Sure, but the "increase rankings" effect of course could be negligible from two pages. However, contact and about us pages are extremely important from a seo perspective. The dumbest webmastering would be to link these pages from every page, and then have them be dead-ends, no links to your other pages. You don't normally want Contact and About pages to have much PR, but whatever they have, you want to sensibly redirect it back into your site.
Since we saw that the total PR of a site assuming certain conditions is X/(1-d) say 5X, this is the theoretical limit for any page, in fact much lower for most pages. However hard we try by adding thousands of pages and linking furiously to any certain page, its PR will not be very high and likely lower than X except for the index page. On the other hand PR of a page can be made quite low.
Also, if you have 200 pages you might get SE traffic to, say, 200 different terms, while for one page the number of terms it will show up for is limited. There's no reason to focus exclusively on the ranking for any one particular page other than vanity, and you can't buy a cup of coffee for that.
If you sell green and blue widgets, then your customer should enter at the blue widget pages if that was his reason for visiting, not at the home page. Your conversion will get better the less pages the user have to visit to accomplish his goal, so a "deep visit" is actually a good thing.
And, is there some kind of limit / cap on the number of 'high scoring' pages you can have, or, if every page were perfectly optimised for your different keywords could every (optimised) page come #1 in SERPS?
