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Search Engine Optimisation Training Course
Lesson No.6 - Understanding Links & PageRank
by Bruce Gow Search Engine Guy Pty Ltd
http://www.searchengine-guy.com.au
Understanding Links
Your ability to design a SEO friendly site comes from your understanding of
PageRank passing and how you can leverage its power and compensate its
weaknesses.
The lesson today will help you have a better understanding of what is PageRank
passing and how it works.
Why PageRank passing?
In order for your pages to be indexed they first need to be crawled.
Using a proper site structure like we learned in Lesson
5: Mapping Your Site Structure highly helps and increases your chances to meet
this first requirement.
After a page has been crawled, if this one meets the minimum requirements of the
search engines, it will be indexed.
In Google a page can be indexed either in the primary
index (that is where you want to be) or the supplementary index (for the pages
that are relevant enough to be indexed, but don’t have sufficient authority yet
to figure in the primary index).
When it comes to PageRank passing, only pages from the primary index in Google
can transmit some; backlinks from pages in the supplementary index are
worthless. You can easily identify those pages as they don’t have PR.
Link power is transmitted by links between different pages from the primary
index only. Those links can both be internal or external. You can identify pages
from the primary index as they all carry a PageRank score ranging from 0 to 10.
The higher the PageRank, the more link power each link from that page can
transmit.
If you want to read more about PageRank, I invite you to read an article in
Wikipedia on Google PageRank
.
How to Get a Page in the Primary Index?
For a page to get into the primary index of Google, it needs to receive a
sufficient amount of link power from other pages. For the sake of explanation,
let’s assume that what you need to get a page in the primary index is 10 points,
and that each inbound link is worth 1 point; this would mean that this page
would require at least 10 inbound links of 1 point value to be listed in the
primary index.
How much link power can a page give?
A page gives out about 80-90% of the link power it receives. This means that if
a page receives 10 points, it can only give out 8-9 points.
In addition, that point value is divided by the number of links on the page
Also, there’s a restriction of 1 link value maximum from one page to another
one. Any additional link towards a page already linked from the current page
will not double the amount of link power passed on towards that page, but
instead half the amount of link power passed on from each of those links.
Special cases
Under special circumstances, it is possible to prevent a link from giving away
or sharing some of the link power of a page. The most popular method being:
• Rel=”nofollow” attribute on the link.
• Unreadable links like Javascript link (Recent news would indicate that Google
may now be able to read those. But I have yet to confirm this information), or
Flash link.
• Meta Robots nofollow.
The link attribute rel=”nofollow” introduced by Google
will prevent a page to give away link power to the target page of the link.
Unreadable links have just the same effect as they are completely ignored, just
as if they didn’t exist on page.
The Meta Robot NoFollow is an extremely powerful command and will have effect
page wide. None of the links on that page will be followed or passed any link
power.
Exercise
The only assignment today is to read this lesson and make sure that you
understand clearly how PageRank passes and how it can be controlled.
In addition, you must learn to identify links that won’t give you link power as
they may end up being a waste of your efforts during a backlink campaign.
1. Learn How
to Sort Out the Competition
2. Do
Your Keyword Research Homework
3. Refining
Your Keywords
4.
Evaluating Ranking Difficulty
5.
Mapping Your Site Structure
6.
Understanding Links & PageRank
7. Sculpting Your Site Structure
8. Cascading Style Sheet
Design
9. Using Wordpress
for SEO
10.
Setting up Your Analytics
11.
Engineering the Title Tag
12.
Optimising The Content
13.
Optimising The Description Tag
14.
Building Internal Links
15.
SEO & Images
16.
OnPage Analysis Using IBP
17.
Link Building 101
18.
Beating Your Competition
19.
Building External Links
20.
Using Structured SEO
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