Page Rank Waste With Overhead Pages
This is an interesting subject that has been at the forefront of my SEO meetings all week. Page Rank dilution is when you are linking to what I call an ‘Overhead Page‘ from every other page on your website.
To follow me in this article you will need the following:
I’m going to start with an example of how exactly PR dilution occurs.
Standard Page Rank Distribution is shown above. This is how a typical website works, for example a standard online shop website.
The home page, which caries the most page rank of the whole website, links to every category page, which then links to every product or post page. This is called standard website hierachy and is reflected in most websites including one of the biggest websites in the world, Amazon.
So what’s the problem? You may ask!
Well here’s an example of what the problem is…
Click here for the home page of one of the UK’s leading audio/visual company’s website’s home page. Now, click here for their returns page. Their home page has a page rank of 4. Their returns page has a page rank of 3.
Let’s just think about this for a second. Their returns page is the second most important page on their website! That’s not the page you want Google to show to customers, it’s boring, and I bet that if you “landed” on that page, you would click the back buton. BOUNCE!
So why is this page a PR3 page?
The reason is that this page is linked to from every other PR1, PR2, PR3 & PR4 page accross the entire website! So the link from the home page is passing PR0.5 and a link from other PR2 pages within the website is passing PR0.25. They all add up to PR3.
Why is this a bad thing?
Well, you should retain all sources of Page Rank at all costs. Every link internally is passing PR from one page to another. What you need to do is pass page rank to the more important pages on your website, like your landing pages (like this one) and your product or article (money) pages.
So what’s the solution?
The main solutions is to ensure that no link juice is being sent to these ‘Overhead Pages’ in the first place by adding a NOFOLLOW to your links:
<a href=”/internal/page/about.html” rel=”nofollow”>About Us</a>
Did you notice the rel=”nofollow”? This instructs Google and other search engines not to credit this link with any “link juice”. Hence imediately all links pointing to this page, will no longer pass it any page rank and subsiquently the pages which would have lost page rank before have now gained more importance.
You should also add the followign line of code to the HTML head of all your ‘Overhead Pages’ on your website.
<meta name=”robots” content=”follow,noindex” />
This is the result:
You should make sure that every page that is a user only page, such as your About Us, Privacy Policy, T&C etc. is classed as an ‘Overhead Page’ and deal with them as such.
Any comments or questions can be posted below.
June 10th, 2009 at 7:42 pm
There is obviously a lot to know about this. I think you made some good points.
June 19th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
The above mentioned tips should be taken into consideration.
July 6th, 2009 at 10:43 pm
I have been looking looking around for this kind of information. Will you post some more in future? I’ll be grateful if you will.