Link hierarchy and page rank

[larryweiss]

I manage two sites. One is an industrial site, of about 30 Pages, which has been reasonably optimized has a PR5, and is # 1 for its main keywords. The other, PR4, about 75 pages, is an artist’s home site, and keywords are irrelevant, but returns # 1 for the artists name. I experiment with the art site to learn more about SEO before changing the industrial one. The goal has been to get the art site to PR5.

On the PR5 site every single page is linked by html to every other page.
On the PR4 site there is carefully planned hierarchy. My first attempt had most of the pages with only two exits. A script back button and an html link to the home page.

That should have produced a dramatic shift, but it stayed PR4.

My last attempt was to change 11 of the fifteen outbound links on the home page to JavaScript links. It has been about a month since that happened, and its still PR4.

The accumulated knowledge of all of the experts here suggests that the rank should have zoomed, but it didn’t, and it’s frustrating.

Can anyone make any comments or suggestions?

[ronniethedodger]

My last attempt was to change 11 of the fifteen outbound links on the home page to JavaScript links. It has been about a month since that happened, and its still PR4.

The accumulated knowledge of all of the experts here suggests that the rank should have zoomed, but it didn’t, and it’s frustrating.

Going (or zooming) from a 3 to 4 maybe. But it is a little tougher to go from 4 to 5. The scale is not linear, it is logrithmic.

You could very well be teetering on a 4.9, just shy of a 5....but the googlebar will only register it as 4 because there is does not report tenths.

Further...you are only controlling the outbound flow when you cut those links off. You did nothing to add to the inbound flow, such as acquiring more links from other sites.

BTW, you should change the Home Page URL you have in your DMOZ Profile to include the www. prefix to the domain name. Try to be consistant by always including this on all link exchanges, or be consistant by not including it. Including it is preferable though.

[Mel]

Hi Larry:

There is a great pagerank calculator tool at http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank_calculator.php3 that will show you the relative effects of different internal linking schemes,but in general inbound links from High TPR pages with few outgoing links are going to be of more help than internal linking schemes.

In thinking about the PageRank you see on the Google toolbar it helps to think of the TPR displayed not as a number but as a label for the bin that true PRs of a certain range are put into for display convenience.

Since they are not numbers you cannot use them in caculations or estimates of how many links it will take to rise up to the next bin, but it is estimated that it takes 5 times more links to increase from a toolbar TPR4 to TPR5 then it did from 3 to 4.

[larryweiss]

Thanks guys. I never expected answere this fast. This is a great place.

My last attempt was to change 11 of the fifteen outbound links on the home page to JavaScript links. It has been about a month since that happened, and its still PR4.
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The net moves soooo slowly. I did change the ODP listing. I did it about six months ago, and I AM THE EDITOR.

I have not tried the calculator because it takes comparatively few pages. Obviously thats a mistake.
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Back to the topic. What happened when I first made the hierarchy system is that my bottom pages went down 2PR clicks. The Middle Pages went down 1PR click, and the pages that were supposed to go up, stayed the same. I guess that could have taken the home page from a 4.0 to 4.9 but my other site with PR5 and all the interconnected pages has 2 Google inbound links. This site has 8 inbound links.

Actually this site has 100+ inbound, but they are not recognized. Probably because they less than 4PR. The Google backlink number has dropped about 50% over the last few months, while the actual # of inbound links has gone up.

This brings me to the next question. How do you guys get so many inbound links. I bought a copy of Arelis, and set it up as they suggested. A nice intro letter, which says that I have already added their site, which I really have. My commercial site has few highly relevant potential link partners, and they all seem to have no reciprocal links on their sites, and don't seem to care. The art site has tons of potential partners, but few with a PR of 4, and those have huge link pages with hundreds if links. There are also a limited number of directories which offer free links. I have read webmaster site posts for years, and read comments like "I just got 1200 new links". A good day for me is 1 new link.

Thanks for the responses.

Larry

[janeth]

Hi Larry,

If someone got 1,200 links in one day I would say that was a link farm.

The best way to get links is to write articules and do press releases those you do not have to link back too.

The next best thing is to find good pr sites that you like and ask the web master to exchange links.

From what I understand Yahoo sales links for $299.00 a year. You do not have to link back your one of ten on most of the times a pr4 page I think it is a good deal.

[Mel]

Hi Larry;
While Goolge is spidering and indexing almost contuously the past couple of months, they still seem to update the PR and back links about once a month, and I think it will be another three weeks until the next update.

I really don't worry much abut PR (I know it looks good to visitors but I don't think it helps much in rankings) and have never solicited or asked for a link.

Thats why I still have a PR of 4 on my home page and mostly 3s inside. Somehow over the past few years some 800 sites have decided to link to me but since I never know about these links until I happen to see who's linking to me, I don't know how or why they do.

In general a good internal linking scheme for conservation of PR will not be the best navigation scheme for visitorsm, so you have to blance once against the other and I happen to think that visitors are more important, so I just use a common menu on all pages that links each page to every other page on the site.

[janeth]

Hi Mel,

The problem is if your trying to get ranked for competitive key words you have to have links, in turn links build up pr

So another words a pr 4 site will never be in the top ten for computers on Google as long as they continue ranking web sites like they do now.

[Mel]

Hi Janeth
Its true that anchor text appears to be important in Google rankings, but a high PR is not a requisite to high rankings, rather it comes along with the links as you mentioned.

I try not to think about PR at all since IMO it may just be put out there in the tool bar to keep us focused on it to the exclusion of the more important parts of the algo.

And you would be surprised what rankings a PR4 site can get.

[janeth]

Hi Mel,

My point was it want get you words like
computer
Profit
search engine optimization

Do you think you can get ranked for those key words with a pr1, pr2 or pr3 site?

[Mel]

HI Janeth
point taken, but I believe you are confusing cause and effect.

It may be that pages which rank well for such words will have a decent PR but such rankings are not caused by the PR, but because the other things you are doing to get the ranking will bring your PageRank up also as a side effect.

What I do believe is that it is possible to get ranked for effective search terms (BTW none of those terms I would judge effective terms because they are too general) without knowing anything about PageRank or making any deliberate use of Page Rank in your strategy.

I believe that on of the best things anyone concerned about his rankings in google can do is to totally forget that such a thing as PageRank exists and concentrate on aspects which have a much greater efect on rankings.