If I want to publish a manuscript to my website but not have it linked
with the site's other pages, will it effect my current position (quite
high) on the "G" search engine?  In other words, I want to have pages
which are accessed only by a select few rather than the general
public.  The content of the pages will be text only and the subject
matter does not relate to the rest of the site.  I have 500 megabytes
of space to play with and use less than 50 now.  I could put a whole
book in there :)

And please, this question is only for webadept.

Hi Digs, thanks for the question. 

Affect it? Yep, probably will. It will probably make the ranking go
higher. I belive you are concerned with it going lower because of the
changes in content type on your server, if I'm reading the question
right, and that will not happen. Let's explain.

First, PageRank is based a few things, external links to your site,
internal link setups to the pages and the physical text content of
your site. Eventually these new areas are going to be linked by
someone from the outside. Even if you ask them not to, someone will
eventually link and the search engines will find them.

That the content of lower level pages is different in subject matter
than the higher level pages, won't come into play in PR. Where it will
come into play is in Page Relevance. More searchers will bring up your
site than what brings it up now. There is a concern with Content or
Page Relevance Dilution on the top two levels of your sites directory
tree.

For instance, let's say my main page is all about PageRank and Google,
but the rest of my website is trying to sell you health insurance.
This will lower my Page Relevance with searches for PageRank and
Google. My PageRank will stay the same, but the spot in which I show
up for PageRank questions will be lower.

That happens (as far as I've been able to tell so far, Google doesn't
publish this about PageRank and Relevance) in the first two levels. If
you created a directory off the main called, "mybooks/thefall/" pages
inside the directory "thefall" would not affect your site this way.

Since you are not going to link to these page areas from your main
pages, they will probably never be indexed by Google at all, since the
robots hit the main page and start following links from there. If the
page is not linked, they don't go looking for it, so most of the above
explanation will never come into play.

The links will from the outside, because the bot going through the
external site, will check to see if the link to your website is good
or not, but that's all it checks really. It doesn't index the page,
just verifies that the link is good.

I hope that answers your question and if you need anything else please
don't hesitate to ask, I would be happy to expound on anything you are
not clear on.

webadept-ga

Thanks - knowing as little as I do about 'puters, I confuse page rank
and page relevance, then again, I confuse easily anyway.  I guess
"relevance" is what I need to worry about?  I enjoy being in the top
10 and top 20 for my various website topics.  I was worried that if I
used the website for a little online writing which was not connected
with the rest of the pages, I would lose those positions.  So if I
understand right, I can put a whole novel in there and it won't effect
anything as long as I have no link to or from the website's "regular"
pages.  Thanks again.