Forum Moderators: open

Message Too Old, No Replies

PageRank division between links

Do 2 links to the same page pass twice as much PageRank?

         

BigDave

10:21 pm on Nov 26, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Has anyone done any experiments to determine if having multiple links from one page to another will count as one link, or does each link count seperately when passing on PR?

For example, you have 10 links on a page, and 2 of them point to your home page. Would it pass (Passed PR) / 9 or would it pass ((passed PR) / 10) * 2?

Right now it is just an academic question for me. But I imagine that if applied properly, you could use it to help shape the PR distribution among your pages.

mikeD

10:38 pm on Nov 26, 2002 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



not sure myself, but always thought google only counts one link from a page

espeed

10:40 pm on Nov 26, 2002 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Google counts one link per page, but does it use all words in every link as link text?

onebaldguy

10:55 pm on Nov 26, 2002 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



What if abc.com has a link to a page on xyz.com in the template for it's pages so it has one link to xyz.com on all of the pages. Would this be transferring the same amount of PR on all of the pages (if the links were the same) or would the PR transfer be discounted somehow? For example, would it be better to have a link from a PR 5 or 100 PR 4's that are all on the same site (assuming the # of other links were the same)?

Another question related to PR and passing it on:
If I have a site with a main page of PR 5 (let's assume that it is a one page site). Then I build 6 additional pages and link them all together. Would my main site possibly go down to a 4 while raising the others?

BigDave

11:11 pm on Nov 26, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



espeed - Have you done some experimenting yourself, or do you have a reference? I could come up with good arguments for it either way, but I would like to find some experimental evidence, or a quotation from a google document. I go back and forth on whether it makes more sense to count it once, or each occurance. The page is still going to pass on the same amount of PR, so does it really matter to google?

onebaldguy - my suspicion (and it is only a suspicion) is that they would not mess with the PR algorithm when it comes to template factors, they are more likely to apply a template filter to other factors in their ranking, such as anchor text.

Those navigation bar links are actually some of your most important links on your page. They should pass on PR. But their anchor text is not as likely to be as revealing as anchor text from the content part of a page.

BigDave

11:14 pm on Nov 26, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



> Another question related to PR and passing it on:
If I have a site with a main page of PR 5 (let's assume that it is a one page site). Then I build 6 additional pages and link them all together. Would my main site possibly go down to a 4 while raising the others?

Passing on PR does not reduce the PR of a page. In fact, if those pages link back to your home page, you will get a very small boost in PR from the intrinsic value of those 6 pages, divided byt their outgoing link count.

ciml

11:47 am on Nov 27, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



BigDave, I measured this recently. 2 links from a page to another page count as one.

I don't know about linking to 2 different URLs that have been merged due to duplication or redirection.

Dino_M

12:01 pm on Nov 27, 2002 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



ciml

What makes you say that the two links are counted as one?

This is very intresting.

I recently had to add an external link to the home page of a site and did not want to use a trick, to make the link pass on no PR. - So I decided to add 6 links to the same page in my site so the external link only receives 1/7th of the homepage PR.

By what your saying it's going half to the external and half to the internal!

Are you sure about this ciml - what about different anchor text, will this make them count as multiple links!

ciml

1:59 pm on Nov 27, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



> half to the external and half to the internal

Yes.

Dino, my view is based on experimentation. The PageRank transfered is exactly the same as if the links from one page to the same URL are merged; the anchor text boost looks to be at least very similar.

I haven't tried with different anchor text, though.

BigDave

2:51 pm on Nov 27, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Thanks ciml,

I was guessing that someone actually tried it.

Did you use the exact same URL both times? What I mean is, does "http://widgets.com/widget.html" "/widget.html" and "../widget.html" count as the same URL when linked from a file in the second level directory?

I have noticed that Google does seem to follow complete URLs more readily than pathnames, that makes sense as it helps them find new servers. But it is possible that it is handled differently while passing PR too.

Chris_R

2:55 pm on Nov 27, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I am pretty sure I read in one of the google documents that they convert all urls to absoulte - so I am pretty sure that you can't do that.

BigDave

3:17 pm on Nov 27, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



They may convert them all to absolute, and since PR is passed at the end of the update, that would make sense that it wouldn't make a difference.

But I can tell you that during a crawl, they are more likely to follow full URLs. The first month, Google only picked up my home page. While my home page was still gray bar, that second month, it only crawled the pages that included the host name. Once I got PR assigned it was much more willing to follow path names.

I tried this on one other site and it behaved in a similar fashion. I have not tried it with a site that only does pathnames, to see if it will crawl those if there are no complete URLs to crawl.

Chris_R

3:20 pm on Nov 27, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I see what you are saying, but I think that might just be a coincidence.

Google's crawler is one of the best out there - they take into account the location and response of the server among other things.

It just wouldn't make sense for them to treat them different (at least I can't think of a reason).

Since they have more than one crawler working at a time sending them out like little soldiers making decisions based on PR, location, lag - and other things - the same site might get spidered differently at different times.

seo4life

3:30 pm on Nov 27, 2002 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Not quite sure about this. Since there`s only a limited amount of PR to distribute from each Page, it is the same effect if a page has 1 Link off or even 100 Links off to the samte Site. In secound case Links are valued only 1/100. But the result in PR increase to the linked page is the same.

Dino_M

3:40 pm on Nov 27, 2002 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Thats true SEO4life but if you had 90 links to one site and 10 to another, would the site with 90 links to it get more of the PR?

I always thought the site with 90 links would get 90% of the available Pr but this is not the case they would get half each!

WW where you learn everyday :)

BigDave

3:40 pm on Nov 27, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



The only reason I can come up with that makes any sense, is that they want to see if the new site is pointing to any other new sites.

A grey bar site is only going to get a limited amount of attention till the PR is calculated. But it is in Google's interest to find any other new servers that this sitem might link to. All external sites will have a complete URL, so they just toss those in the queue.

I'm not claiming it as fact, it is just what I have observed with the 2 sites that I have put up so far. It could be coincidence.

ciml

6:01 pm on Nov 27, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Welcome to WebmasterWorld, seo4life.

Like Dino, I thought that the page with 90 links out of 100 would get 90% of the available PR. It seems to match the 'random surfer' idea better, but it's not what happens to me.

I can only guess that someone inside Google felt that it would be best to merge outbound links from one page to another.