Google and Link Structure

Lose Page Rank Every Level

[josmond]

Can someone confirm that Google reduces page rank each sub level the user clicks?

I have implemented my own isapi filter that makes each page looks like a top level document. Two days after putting the new site up googlebot took two days to crawl the site and indexed every single page. The current page rank is inaccurate because the new site went up after the index had been updated.

Will this increase any page rank because every page has no query string >)

Can't wait till the new index updates!

[wingslevel]

I've spent a lot of time on this one because my site has thousands of pages and my wimpy pr6 just doesn't get down to the lower levels.

The old rule of thumb (which has plenty of exceptions) is that if your site is pr 6 and you go down this path - home> sporting goods> baseball> baseball batts> aluminum bats - that the aluminum bats page will have a pr of 2 (*!&*^$*&%$). On my sites, this has held true 90% of the time - of course it depends on how many links are on each page etc.

There are some other threads on this, but I don't think that google just looks at the length of the string or how many /'s - I think it is based on how many incoming links the aluminum bats page has - that number is only going to be 1 or 2, so the pr won't be great.

I tried an experiment with this. I took a pr 6 site and put hundreds of links to the baseball bats level off of the home page. The page looked horrible and you had to scroll for about 5 minutes to get to the bottom of the nav bar, but the baseball bats pages came up to a pr4. I am actually making a dhtml nav bar for this site now - maybe it will get more manageable.

[taxpod]

I concur with wingslevel. The actual depth has little to do with PR. The number of inbound links to a particular page is what matters. Your site navigation plays an important role in this however, so that if you use a normal nac structure, the "more shallow" pages will of course have higher PR. For example:

Say you have:

home page - domain
subsections - topic1, topic2, etc.
detail pages - 1, 2, 3

your nav might be:

home
topic1
topic2

on each of your pages including subsections and detail pages. If domain has PR 6 and transfers this down to subsections, and then subsections transfer their PR up to domain and down to detail pages 1 -3, the end result is always going to be a higher PR the higher you go up in the structure. But if you had, for example, a ton of inbound links on domain/topic1/detail1, you would probably see a higher PR on this than on other detail pages.

To restate, the "levels down" or "////" in the url probably is not going to make the difference.