Another PR Drop?

Originally posted by blackhawk
(do sub pages links pr-drain the main page?)

Sure, but it’s not via anything mystical. If your main page links to your inner pages, you are sending the inner pages PR. If your inner pages then linked out to disney.com or something that didn’t send you back PR, then you would not be lower your index page PR, but you would be missing the opportunity to raise its PR.

Simple example… you have a PR5 main page. You link to your own page2.php, which becomes PR4. page2.php links to disney.com. You still have a PR5 main page, but you would have a slightly higher PR5 if your main page was being linked to by page2.php.

This follows through on all your pages. The more PR you recycle back to your main page, the stronger your main page is. The more PR you spin off from your subpages, the less pop you have left to send back to yourself.

Hi Classics,

so would it be better to link to all your inside pages from the main page?

or better to have a single link from your main page taking surfers to a page marked say, site map, and having surfers do their navigation from this page, as opposed from the main page.

and then as I understand it; you’d want every inside page to link to your main page (this a one-way link), is that correct?

thanks,

S.

One theory is to use the high PR that your main page has and channel that to only the important pages that you want to give the most PR benefit to, and those pages you don’t care about, eg contact details etc, don’t link from the main page. That way you are not diluting the PR to pages that may be necessary but aren’t important in the selling process for SE traffic.

BUT, don’t let SEO win over usability. Make it difficult for the visitor to move around and it doesn’t matter how much traffic you get, if they don’t move past the first page and leave your site then all the SEO in the world is not going to help.

“so would it be better to link to all your inside pages from the main page?”

“Better for what” is an important question, and the answers can be all over the board. If you only care about main page PR (a major mistake in my opinion) then you would go down one road. If you were trying to rank for dozens of pages, then you would do other tactics.

“or better to have a single link from your main page taking surfers to a page marked say, site map, and having surfers do their navigation from this page, as opposed from the main page.”

This is usually not good. It IS good to have a site map linked from the main page, which links to all pages (or to all main sections if your domain is huge), but each time you link the PR you pass goes through a “dampening” effect. You lose about 15% of your link pop each time youhave a stop in the linking process. So comparing:
A links to B which links to C
to
A links to C
in the second example the PR of C would be somewhat higher.

So, don’t make you PR make uneccessary stops.

“and then as I understand it; you’d want every inside page to link to your main page (this a one-way link), is that correct?”

Assuming you want you main page to have the highest PR is can, yes all pages should link to it. But it’s not that simple. If pageZ links back to the main page and has five links in total on that page, it will deliver back to the main page a lot more PR than if it has 100 links on it… even if thos 90+ other links go to pages on your domain that link back to the main page, your are again dampening the flow of PR back to the main page.

PR is like a river that rolls throw your site(s). You can direct that river, make bigger resevoirs and smaller ones, make all subpages about equal in PR or (usually much better) have some sub pages that have higher PR than other subpages. It really depends on what you want to accomplish.

In general, a lot of gambling domains hemoragge PR and don’t recycle what they have back through their domains very well.

Getting back to the first question, size of a domain matters in answering this. What to do with a 20 page domain is different than a 200 page one or a 20,000 page one. One bedrock rule of thumb is to not have more than 100 links on any page, but beyond that you can make a few sensible choices based on where you want to focus your PR.

Classics,

So a huge UN-Managed link directory is a HUGE problem?

If people quit returning in-bounds and you don’t catch it, that’s huge, right?

So checking links or smaller easy to manage quality link sections would be better. Could be an easy PR boost.

?

I noticed that a lot of sites lost another hunk of PR this months spin… any insider word as to what happened this time? or was it just me and my sites?

Bernie

“So a huge UN-Managed link directory is a HUGE problem?”

Huge link directories are a bigger problem in that “bad neighborhood” linking is now a lot worse than before. Linking to a site that links to every bit of trash on the Internet can cause you trouble. I’m sure a lot of gambling sites that do tons of link exchanges with anybody are shooting themselves in the foot badly because they don’t pay attention to who they link to links to.

But that has nothing to do with PR. In terms of PR, think of it as you having a bunch of votes… say 10,000. If you send 4000 of your votes off into the mist where you get no benefit in return, you are hurting yourself because you could be sending those 4000 votes back to your own pages, or to legit link partner sites… OR, you could just have 4000 less links, and each one of your remining links becomes more powerful (for example, combine the power of 4000 PR3 links and you might have 500 PR4 links).

On the other hand, if this HUGE link directory is not sent a lot of PR by you… for example, it just has one single link to it from your main page, but nowhere else, then it may be doing little harm. The difference between PR1.4568 and PR1.3984 isn’t enough to bother about.

“If people quit returning in-bounds and you don’t catch it, that’s huge, right?”

It depends. I wouldn’t usually say huge, but it matters. If you have several front page links not being reciprocated, yes, that likely could be called “huge”.

“So checking links or smaller easy to manage quality link sections would be better. Could be an easy PR boost.”

Yes, especially the second. Quality is better than quantity, in terms of PR.

“I noticed that a lot of sites lost another hunk of PR this months spin… any insider word as to what happened this time? or was it just me and my sites?”

My view is that most quality sites did well this time, while sites that relied on sheer volume of links did not as well.

The most obvious Internet-wide phenomenon this time is Yahoo went to PR10, so many many Yahoo Directory categories gained a full point in PR. So… sites in the Yahoo Directory gained in general while sites that aren’t fell. That isn’t the ONLY thing that happened, but now that is HUGE.

===

In your case Blackhawk, I think Google is sorting out php/querystring PR issues. A lot of sites with querystring pages have shown guessed PR or whitebars instead of actual PR, and I’m not sure that Google has it sorted out yet how to best handle these sort of pages. So it could easily sort out fine next time, but just glancing at your site, I think you need to focus your links better. Less links off the main page to a few strong subpages with static/unique urls (even if .php) , which then link back to your main page, and then link down to a larger mass of query string pages.

thanks guys for taking time to explain all this to me.

after trying yet again and gaining little headway, I’ve decided that I may never be good at SEO, but at least I’m understanding enough to find it interesting.

However, I’ve still a few tricks up my sleeve to getting some decent traffic.

I think I may have a way around the google situation and am hoping to be able to advertise in their adwords again within the next 30 to 45 days.

I’ll let you know if my crazy scheme works or not.