Clarification of Answer by
webadept-ga
on
21 Aug 2002 00:13 PDT
I wrote an article on this, can't post the whole thing here, but here
is some of it to help you further understand the Page Rank system
which is used by Google.
Google, has in the past half of a year introduced the Page Rank
feature. If you are not familiar with Google's Page Rank, which is
known as PR most the time, its Google's calculation or score of a web
page based on external and internal linking of a site, as well as
on-page criteria of the web page being linked to as well as the web
page being linked from. The actual amount of effect that Google's
PageRank has on the ranking of a website or web pages is the cause of
much discussion, and Google is keeping its mouth shut on the topic.
What we do know is that a web page's PR does play a role in Google's
indexing and Google's ranking. The higher a web page's PageRank, the
more frequently it will be crawled and refreshed. This is important on
several levels.
Internal linking
To get your Page Rank up you need to pay attention to the foundation
design of your website. The menu systems, links to internal pages from
front pages, from bottom tier pages back to higher levels, and several
other factors. We're going to go through some of that here.
On most sites, the first page, or the index.html page is going to have
the highest PR rating. This makes sense, it being out there getting
hit all the time, and if some else is linking to you, its probably
that page, but you still need to watch how this happens to get the
best effect for your total site.
Lets say your site has three levels of pages. The first is the
Index.html, at the top of the pyramid. The next level is your About
Us, Contact, News, and Items for Sale, cover pages. The third level is
full story pages, product pages, and the more detailed info pages that
your site is offering.
In standard design, the top index page is going to link to the menu
pages, and then those main menu pages are going to link down to the
more detailed pages on the third level.
Let's give your site a Page Rank of 6 on the top level, the
index.html. This is a really good ranking by the way, this means lots
of websites like you and you are doing something right.
As the links happen, and we go down into your site, we'll see that the
second level pages have a rating of 5 on the PR bar. Going further
down to our product pages we see that these detail pages have a level
of 3, or even 2 on some of them.
This type of PR dilution makes since to the robots, but our bottom
layer pages is often where most of the details of our websites lie,
and the content that will bring into our site the web searcher looking
for information on the web. We want these pages to show up better on
the search engines and have higher page rankings themselves.
That these pages have poor PR doesn't necessarily mean that they will
not place well on the search listings, some place very well, but the
better rank they have, the better our whole site will place.
The guys over at Top Site Listings came up with a good checklist. I
don't know much about their company, but many of their articles are
sound in reason and accuracy. You might want to check them out.
* Make sure that your primary page(s), the index.htm page, links to
your secondary pages or secondary levels.
* Make sure that your secondary pages link to each other
* Link your secondary pages to the third level pages within their
sub-directory, sub-domain, or level
* Link the third level pages within each specific sub-directory or
sub-domain to each other.
* Link the third level pages back to the secondary page that it was
linked from
* Make sure that the there is not heavy linking between third level
pages
* Link to pages, regardless of level, that are relevant
* Link to pages, regardless of level, where the text on the page being
linked from is keyword specific to the page that you are linking to
* If there are fourth level pages, follow the same linking structure
that has been laid out in this checklist
Other reminders:
* Only link pages within your site that are relevant to each other
* Use keyword specific link text when linking between pages
* Use standard HREFs in links that are easy for the search engine
robots.
External Linking
The greatest effect on your PR is going to come from external links.
This seems like a bummer because we don't have much control over what
someone else will do with their site. Also its just as important Who
links to us, as it is how many link to us.
Internet is based on community and what some people call per review.
Always has been and this is some of the basis of what Google considers
good external links. There are well thought out reasons for this. If
someone that owns a car dealership is linking to my page, Google
doesn't feel that the link is as important as say another Internet
Programmer linking to my page. A link from a page in the same type of
category is a per review for better or worst. The link may becoming
from my competitor from inside an article that explains how much I
don't know about internet programming, and why you should stick with
him. That's okay, says Google, its still a per, so the PR is higher
for my site. As they say about gossips, "Hey, at least they are
thinking about you."
My link in this article is helping Top Site Listing's PR, but not as
much as you might think. Their current PR is 5 and at the time of this
writing, mine is 4. Having a lower site link to a higher site is not
as good as the reverse happening. This is not to say it doesn't help
them, but its a lower calculation.
This is why the idea of getting 100 domain names and having them all
link to your main website is not really a worth wild idea. The 100
domains are not going to have a high PR, in fact, with this strategy,
they normally don't have a PR at all. And if they are all linking to
each other, the web-bots figure this out and call it spamming, and
black list the whole lot of you.
I hope this helps clear some of this up for you. Currently your lower
pages have no page rank at all, so its possible that it will be
sometime before they get indexed and ranked again.
webadept-ga
