PR of links page: a special case?

[newreality]

Does anyone have recommendations for increasing the PR of a links page?

My site as a index PR5 page along with couple other 5 pages, some 4's, with the links coming in at 4.

The links page links to five other PR 5 sitewide pages (including index) already from the bottom of page. Does linking to "5" pages from the links page dilute the PR value of these pages?

What about if the other site "5" pages, link to the "links" page? Are these PR 5 pages diluted in this case (since going to outbound links page)?

How else to increase the PR of links page? Is there any harm in calling it a "links" page? Should the "links" page contain the keyword term that is necessary to the other pages/or that is popular among the links themselves?

[seobook]

linking to other pages from your links page does not dilute the pagerank of that particular page itself. it dilutes what it can share with others, but that is it, the display # (or little green bar) will not change based on who that page links to unless your site gets banned for linking into shoddy neighborhoods.

for maximum pagerank on your links page you may want to link to it from all the other pages in your site.

[stoner3221]

My submissions resources page is basically a links page and was PR3. I added some text and a site map to my main site and it went to a PR6.

[powerofeyes]

As SEOBOOK pointed out outbound links wont dilute a pages PR, They just transfer each link a portion of the pages pagerank, To get higher Pagerank for your links page just move your links page nearer to the top level of the domain(your index page), From what i can see what you are doing is right so just do what you are doing now,

[Mel]

There is nothing special about the PR of a links page - it is created in just the same manner as the PR of any other page, as the result of a calculation the number of links pointing to the page, the PR of the linking page and the number of outbound links on the linking page.

Moving the position of you links page closer to the root will not affect the PR of your links page, it can only be done with links pointing to the page.

[cariboo]

There is nothing special about the PR of a links page - it is created in just the same manner as the PR of any other page

I agree with you Mel. The PR algorithm works well with links pages, no need to make an exception.

linking to other pages from your links page does not dilute the pagerank of that particular page itself.it dilutes what it can share with others, but that is it, the display # (or little green bar) will not change based on who that page links to unless your site gets banned for linking into shoddy neighborhoods.


Seobook, and powerofeyes, you give good advice about the right thing to do to prevent pr leaks, but i'm afraid your explanation about PR dilution is not complete.

Pagerank is an iterative algo. If you consider only the way the pagerank of one page is transmitted to others by outbound links, you consider only one iteration of the algorithm. And things happen at next iteration.

For instance, if the link pages points back to the index page, the dilution of PR for links in the link page does have an effect on the PR of index page and links page. If you add many more links in the links page, the PR transmitted to the index page by the link to this index page, will be reduced. And so will b the PR of index page, and of your links page.

So PR dilution is an actual problem, but it doesn't have the drastic effects people usually suspect... The impact on the PR of the index page is very small (only the PR transmitted by one inbound link is affected. If this page has many inbound links, you won't be able to notice it.)

Thanks to the iterative aspect of pagerank algorithm, making many good outbound links can even have positive effects on PR ! For this to happen, you just have to point on pages with links to your pages, or even to pages pointing to pages with links to your pages !

People often wonder why directories can have good pageranks with so many outbound links... In fact, the PR transmitted by outbound links often comes back one way or another.

[powerofeyes]

Moving the position of you links page closer to the root will not affect the PR of your links page, it can only be done with links pointing to the page.

When I mean moving the links page to the top level it simply means moving the page near to the page which has most number of links and obviously index page has the most number of links so I said move it near to that, If that happens it simply means links page gets more PR transfer from the index page which should be mostly having the highest pagerank,

[Marcia]

powerofeyes, I think the point being raised is that it isn't the "physical" location of the links page, whether it's in the root directory or even a few subs in. It's how many clicks away it is from the high PR pages linking to it that would determine how much PR it gets.

[Mel]

PR actually has nothing to do with positions or clicks, only with links pointing to a page. If a hundred PR7 links point to a page that is ten clicks and ten directories away from the index page it will get the same PR as if it were an index page with the same number of links pointing to it.

I suspect that this is one of those urban myths that perhaps got started when someone noticed that the Google toolbar will sometimes guess at the PR of a new page based on the PR of the index page and how "far" away (click-wise) the new page was from the index page. But this is a toolbar guesstimate and is always corrected to a calculated value the next time PR is updated.

[Marcia]

>>PR actually has nothing to do with positions or clicks, only with links pointing to a page.

OK. let's clarify it, Mel. If it takes one click to navigate from the homepage to the links page rather than clicking (navigating) to another page first from which you can click (navigate) to the links page then there will be less PR for the links page in the second instance.

In the first - you click on a link once on the homepage - there is a direct link to the links page from the homepage.

In the second - you click on a link on the homepage to get to another page first, and from that second one you click to get to the links page - which does not have a link directly from the homepage.

One click, two clicks - clicking on links - different PR in each instance. In the the second case the PR of the links page will be lower because it took two clicks to get to it from the homepage.

This is referring to structure of internal navigation, which is how a lot of people mess up with important product pages - with the management of their linking structure, not taking maximum advantage of routing PR to the important pages from the higher PR pages.

[Mel]

Hi Marcia, many people are confused about PageRank, but the navigation route you take to get to a page has nothing at all to do with the PR of the page, nor does the directory location or the number of clicks it takes to get to it from the home page.

PR strictly depends on the number of links pointing to the page, the PR of the pages those links come from and the number of outgoing links on the linking page. This is not my idea this is the formula the founders of Google published and it says clearly that PR is calculated in this way. Google uses the same formula for every page in its index and it does not know or care if the links are from a page within or outside of your site, or anything else, just so long as they are links.

I can understand how commonsense thinking might lead you to those conclusions but lets take a hypothetical example.

Lets imagine a site with a messy navigation system that takes fifteen clicks on the shortest route to get from the PR4 homepage to the links page, you might think that the PR of the links page might be quite small (say PR2 at best?) and you might be right, but you might also be off by a wide margin.

Suppose I now write a great article about how to organize a links page, get that article published on a PR8 page with only a link from my article to my links page as an example of how to do things.

Even though the PR of the home page is only PR4, the links page in this instance may well have a PR7 (or even higher if other pages on my site link to it, and/or if another site picks up my article and republishes it on another high PR page).

You can also vary the PR of selected pages within your site by choosing a linking scheme that emphasizes some pages at the expense of others, and most choose to direct their internal links to pages that they want to rank highly.

[NFFC]

>many people are confused about PageRank

That may be true, Marcia isn't one of them, thats good solid advice about structuring the internal nav of a site.

>confused
>urban myths that perhaps got started when someone noticed that the Google toolbar will sometimes guess at the PR of a new page based on the PR of the index page and how "far" away (click-wise) the new page was from the index page

I think if you take the rather simlpistic and popular view of "a link is a vote and some votes count more than others" you could dismiss that myth. If on the otherhand you understand that PR is simply a representation of the likelyhood that a surfer, on a random walk through the web, will land on a particular page it may put the " how "far" away (click-wise)" guess into a different perspective.

>Does anyone have recommendations for increasing the PR of a links page?

Marcia's first post nails it for me. Of course you could always write a great article about your links page and get a link from a PR8 site. ;)

[cariboo]

Mel and Marcia, you're saying the same thing, but in a different way.

If it takes one click to navigate from the homepage to the links page rather than clicking (navigating) to another page first from which you can click (navigate) to the links page then there will be less PR for the links page in the second instance.

Marcia you're right about this. If you have only one outbound link on a page, the PR transmitted by this link alone is not 100% of the PR. At each jump, you lose part of the PR. There is a coefficient in the algorithm (d < 1), and it prevents PR to be fully transmitted from one page to another page. So the number of jumps from one page to another is important.

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

Mel, Marcia describes a behavior that is the direct consequence of the PR algorithm.

I suspect that this is one of those urban myths that perhaps got started when someone noticed that the Google toolbar will sometimes guess at the PR of a new page based on the PR of the index page and how "far" away (click-wise) the new page was from the index page. But this is a toolbar guesstimate and is always corrected to a calculated value the next time PR is updated.

I agree with you about that, Mel. Many people are confused by this googlebar feature. It shows some PRs that don't exist ! It's based upon a simple formula with another coefficient (K < 1 too).

[Mel]

Hi Cariboo

If it takes one click to navigate from the homepage to the links page rather than clicking (navigating) to another page first from which you can click (navigate) to the links page then there will be less PR for the links page in the second instance.

Yes I agree that it is true the PR will decrease in this manner provided that you place some restrictions on things:
The only inbound external links are to the homepage only
The only internal links are from the homepage to the second page to the links page...
Because this scenario only takes into account the ranking contributions from a single page, and not the interactions of additional external or internal links.

But these are IMO not realworld restrictions and certainly are not the best way to organize your internal linking structure if you want to target more than one or two terms on the entire site.

IMO putting the majority of the links to the home page is one of the most common mistakes made.

Its much better to place anchor text links to pages that you want to rank well for the anchor text, and to arrange your internal linking structure in such a way that pages that you want to rank better have more links pointing at them.

I do agree that its probably a good idea to have a high PR links page if you want to do reciprocal linking, but do not want people to get the idea that you can accomplish that simply by putting the links page in the root directory or one click away from the index page.