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If i had
http*//www.mydomain.com with PR 4
http*//www.mydomain.com/foo with PR3
http*//www.mydomain.com/foo/bar with PR2
http*//www.mydomain.com/foo/bar/index.html with PR1
If http*//www.mydomain.com/foo/bar/index.html is your product then when users searched that page will only have a PR1 (so my googlebar shows me).
Why not just drop sub-directories (if you can) and have everything served from the root path where the PR is the highest?
http*//www.mydomain.com/myproduct_1_.html PR 3 not 1 now.
If i am wrong in assuming that this is how infact it works with google as i was just doing some tests on the site and watched my PR in the toolbar.
I use a flat structure to most of my sites but, due to a large number of pages, the navigation is hierarchical, so I see the same sorts of results.
One thing that I have found that does help is to strengthen some of the subdirectory pages, making them sites onto themselves. In this way, as people begin linking directly to the subdirectories, they pick up PR on their own, sending it upward and downward. It is possible for a subdirectory to have a higher PR than the main domain, although I don't see that very often. Having strong subdirectories strengthens the entire site, PR-wise as well as in its usefulness to visitors.
Google guesses the Pagerank:[webmasterworld.com...]
this isn't entirely true. it isn't how many "/" you have in your url, it's how many "clicks" it takes to get there. i have a page that when you click on a link, it just posts back to itself; and i drop 1 PR value. i do suffer b/c in order to get to a product detail page on my site, you have to go through 3 clicks just to see it. so i, in turn, lose 3 PR points before you can even see the product detail :(. the only way to fix that is to redesign my whole storefront, which isn't an option right now.
for example:
home/widgets/blue & white widgets/blue widgets/dark blue widgets
The last category will have a PR of 1 when the homepage got 5.
What about a sitemap with all levels accessable within two clicks?
What about 'latest content' on your homepage that serves the deepest level within 1 click?
Is this measured 'initially / once' or will this be measured every month?
It doesn't seem to be whether it is a subdirectory or not but more how many links deep.
Anne
Thus changing your inner page set up won't help. You have to get people to link to those inner pages to increase their PageRank.
On top of that, may I suggest paying less attention to the toolbar? :)
My simple analogy (for a simple me) I try to think of PR like water....it continues downstream and your site is just a minor current in the bigger stream ;)
The only form of a tributary for your PR score is to receive it from outside the site.
"how many clicks to a page" matters to an extent, because most PR is directed at the home page of a website, so it looks like its decreasing as it filters down the navigation ladder.
But it is links and only links that matter for PR. The more links a page has linking to it, the more authorative it appears in the eyes of google.
The only way to gain this authority is to get credit in the form of hyperlinks pointing to your site. PR is based on links and perceived authorities, not clicks or where a file resides on a server.
As said, the forum library is a good place to start if you are unsure about pagerank, just in case anyone is unsure ;)
On my site, what affects the pagerank of lower pages is, clicks from homepage, number of internal links to that page, number of external links to that and nearby pages.
In any case, I think Google relies more heavily on on-page elements than they would have you believe.
Does this mean that www.mysite.com/keyword/page.htm is just as good as: keyword.mysite.com/page.htm?
subdomain vs. subdirectory is really a whole different topic, which we've discussed many times.
But the short answer is, if you are talking just about PR, the structure in and of itself doesn't have anything to do with it.
Using the original example:
http*//www.mydomain.com with PR 4
http*//www.mydomain.com/foo with PR3
http*//www.mydomain.com/foo/bar with PR2
http*//www.mydomain.com/foo/bar/index.html with PR1
http*//www.mydomain.com/foo/bar/index.html
Would most likely be a PR 3 rather than a PR1 if http*//www.mydomain.com linked directly to it.
[edited by: WebGuerrilla at 6:50 pm (utc) on Jan. 17, 2003]
it [PageRank] looks like its decreasing as it filters down the navigation ladder.
Exactly right -- emphasis added. In practice because the navigational structure of most sites that use subdirectories is somewhat "in alignment with" the directory structure, it often appears as though how deep a given page is in that directory structure in influencing PageRank.
It may be a little more accurate to think of "how many clicks" as having an effect, but again it's really just an illusion caused by the way PageRank is allocated from page to page.
In reality PageRank is affected only by two things: incoming links from other sites (most of which, for most sites, come to the index page) and the site's own internal link structure.
the site's own internal link structure
Yep, and that internal link structure can make a big difference. A page linked by a PR7 page will have better PR than one linked by a PR5 page. Often your root directory home page has the best PR while a sub topic index page usually has less.
But... It's possible that an inner page will have the higest PR because it is a topic that has been linked a great deal from outside related sites. In that case the usual descending PR would not be the case.
Anne
