|
||||
 |
||||
|
|
||||
|
||||
Welcome to the ineedhits Search Engine Marketing blog, where we share the latest search engine and online marketing news, releases, industry trends and great DIY tips and advice.
Last week I wrote about the importance of flat website architecture and how cross linking can help to improve the ranking of sub pages on your website. This week I’d like to cover this in a little more detail by discussing the concept of PageRank leakage and how you can prevent this happening on your website.
What is PageRank Leakage?
To explain PageRank leakage, you must first understand how PageRank or ‘link juice’ is distributed between various links on a page. Taking a very simplistic view, lets say that a page has 20 ‘PageRank points’ and passes 100% of its link power to 5 other pages. Each sub page would then receive 4 ‘PageRank points’ as shown in the example below:
Keeping this example in mind, let’s say that your homepage now has 5 additional external links to other webpages. Using the formula above, each link now only carries 2 ‘PageRank points’ with half of your link juice being distributed to other external webpages.
PageRank leakage is when outbound links to external websites give away PageRank that could be better distributed among pages within the website.
Preventing PageRank Leakage
The most effective way to prevent PageRank leakage is to eliminate redundant external links. By doing this you will focus PageRank distribution amongst other pages on your website and improve their overall ranking in search results.
Here are some common sources of external pagerank leakage:
Why “Nofollow” Tags Won’t Work
Some webmasters have suggested adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to each external link to prevent this link from passing any PageRank and effectively funnelling all link juice internally. Unfortunatley, this will not have any real impact as the PageRank for each nofollow link is evaporated, reducing the amount of link juice that can be passed to other pages.
Matt is a marketing professional at ineedhits.com, an international search marketing firm. Matt's passion for online marketing began at university and has proved invaluable in steering product development and marketing initiatives at the company. Matt is a regular contributor to the ineedhits search marketing blog. Top 10 Listing! Get more targeted visitors to your site! No click fees! Find Out More Here | 1000+ Guaranteed Visitors Get thousands of guaranteed website visitors to your site in 30 days! Get Started Here |
Thats a bit fluffy…
“Some webmasters have suggested adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to each external link to prevent this link from passing any PageRank and effectively funnelling all link juice internally. Unfortunatley, this will not have any real impact as the PageRank for each nofollow link is evaporated, reducing the amount of link juice that can be passed to other pages”
and what’s the evaporated bit about, more details needed if you have them
D
By Dave - September 15, 2010
Hi Dave,
Here’s how Google’s Matt Cutts explains PR Evaporation,
Question: Hey Matt, just to get back to PageRank sculpting for a second, you had mentioned that if you had 10 links on the home page and five of them you made nofollow so there were only five left, it used to be that the remaining PageRank would be kinda distributed amongst those remaining five.
Matt Cutts: Correct
Question: Now you’re saying that that’s changed and that’s not really happening, so there is some kind of a loss of PageRank. Where is it going?
Matt Cutts: You can almost think of it as just evaporating.
Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the number of links on the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.
By Matthew Elshaw - September 15, 2010
[...] Is Your Website Leaking PageRank? [...]
By The Anatomy of a Perfect Website | - March 2, 2012
CATEGORIES AUTHORS
