Internet Marketing Journal UK

I was just wandering through the web, I can’t even remember what I was looking for (I hate it when that happens don’t you), and came across some stuff from Dan Theis on Building Website Structures. He was talking about using ‘nofollow’ on links to funnel PageRank onto specific pages within a site structure. Is a compelling read - is similar to an idea that Peter Hoggan developed a while back, about two and half years ago, but he used Javascript instead. (Pete explained it by using the PageRank calculator tool).

The Concept

The basic concept is that we want certain links to be given priority to give pages higher PageRank. Some links add to usability of a website but can detract from the search engine objectives - do you really need to link to your homepage three times for example on every page - or wouldn’t it be better to link only once on your internal page and spread the PageRank juice around local pages more?

So what you can do is funnel your PageRank effectively onto specific internal pages within the site. All we’re doing is reducing the number of PageRank leakage points on each page.

I’m going to explain what we did with JavaScript - the ideas are the same just the implementation differed.

How did we use it

The site we used it on was selling adult related products. And we had limited PageRank to play with and wanted to stay away from link spamming etc. So we used this system to make the most of what we had. So on product pages homepage links (bar one) and some other stuff (such as add to basket type things) were placed in JavaScript - no need for a basket page with sessions etc to be given. So what we did was managed to reduce the spiderable outgoing links on a page by about 20-30% (depending on the page). This meant that every link left passed 20-30% more PageRank. It worked! In fact from what I remember it worked pretty well.

At the time so many people were just linking every page to every other page within their website - you know those footers that are jammed with keyword rich/spammed links on every page of a site. These links are annoying when you read a page and also minimise thePageRank transferred from page to page within your website.

How does Dan use it?

In Dans system he’s working to rid sites of the hated Google supplemental pages. Supplemental Pages aren’t visible through the google ’site:’ advanced operator any longer but they exist. dan talks about forcing PageRank through the website to specific pages to get them out of the supplementals. It’s a system that I think will work -espescially if used well within larger sites, such as e-commerce site with large product indexes, that have little PageRank to work with.

On a further note get down to SEOFastStart.com and download his free e-book. Its well worth the read and his newsletter is always a good way to get an engaging, and well thought out, set of opinions on SEO and other bits and pieces.