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Do these links count for anything? Or are only external links counted?
2. Some competitors have registered multiple domain names with keywords for the site. Example: brandnameAwidgets.com, brandnameBWidgets.com, etc. These domains point to product sections within their site. This trick most likely infringes on trademarks of the brand name companies, however does this give them any advantage in PR? Or does the Googlebot recognize the duplicate pages?
Thanks
There are many important reasons for having good internal linking, but it is not a major help with PR. At least not like the value of the more important incoming links.
As for the multiple domains, it has always been a bad idea to build your SE strategy to include spamming the SE's and it has contributed to some of the present day headaches for us all. Now it is dangerous to do it since we are all being encouraged to report domains that are spamming. It is one way the SE's are gaining our sport to police the Web for improved results.
I find it very important to understand and keep up with the guidelines at the SE's like here at Google. [google.com...]
I'd like to get clearer on how you're seeing them doing this:
>These domains point to product sections within their site.
Do those additional domains have content on them, and are they independent sites that link to sections of a larger site with content duplicated? And do they have links pointing to them and Google rankings of their own? Or are they redirected or just pointed?
As Terry says, inbound links are most important for Page Rank. Internal linking does have a bearing to a degree on PR, especially in respect to the internal linking structure and how the PR is distributed through the site.
I'm not sure if that's related to what you've seen with the site with the extra domains, if that's what you mean.
Are you saying that you've seen that when absolute URLs are used the links are being credited but not when they're relative?
Internal links are listed when you do a link: search if google decides that they are important enough to list. General concensus here is that a major factor it that the linking page should have a PR of 4 or higher, but I have seen some 3s show up, and some as high as 5 not show up.
PageRank is by the page. It does not matter if a link coming to a page is internal or external to your site. There are even cases where you can add more pagerank to your site's total by adding an internal page than by getting a low PR external link. But in most cases you will be getting your link from a page with sufficient PR to be worth more than making your own page.
The advantage that the other company *might* get from those domains is more related to keyowrds than PR. Without anyone linking to those domain names, google would not even know that they are there. If someone links to those domain names, it will not transfer over to the main domain without a link or a redirect being involved. In fact, if google identifies it as duplicate content, it will get removed from their index and they could be throwing out whatever PR they are getting at those domains.
This site has their primary site hosted on a very popular store platform. They also have their own web server (IP and domains registered to them). They are hosting all of their additional domains on this server (all have same IP, but different from their hosted primary site). These individual sites contain only one page of content. This page is a copy of the section page from their primary site.
For example, the site www.brand-A-widgets.com would contain a copy of the "brand-A-widgets" section on their primary web site. All of the links on this page point into their primary web site.
So these links would originate from different domains with a different IP from their primary site, but would contain identical content.
Would these be seen as a mirror and not counted?
Both absolute and relative links to a homepage from internal pages are found using the link: function.
PR boost from internal pages is significant insofar as it rewards a site with a large amount of content. However, there must be some kind of dampening factor to prevent a continuous positive-feedback loop generating infinite PR.
If a site has three pages and a total pool of PR of 4 points for the homepage and 3 for the other pages, the total pool of PR for the site is 10. If each page links to every other page then each page might have a PR of around 3.3. But if the internal pages link to the homepage then you might get a PR of 5 on the homepage and 2.5 on the internal pages.
Add a page to the site, now we have a homepage at 4 and three internal pages at 3. Total pool now equals 13. If each page links to all the others then each page might have a pagerank of around 4.25. But if the internal pages link to the homepage then you might get a PR of 6 on the homepage and 2.3 on the internal pages.
Having more internal pages increases the total pool of PR in your site. More so if you have external links into your internal pages as well.
Linking your internal pages to the homepage doesn't increase the total pool of PR but it does distribute it more in favour of your homepage.
Your aim should be to weight the PR pool in your site towards the pages that you want to come up in the SE results. Usually this is the homepage, but you might have e.g. a catalogue page in the site or some other source of revenue that you might want to optimise too.
