Which links are best?
Not only do the number of incoming links count toward your pages PR but also the PR of the site which the incoming link is coming from. Receiving a link from a page of PR5 is worth much more to you than receiving a link from a page of PR1. If you think of PR as authority of a page and an incoming link as a vote, you will get a more substantial "vote" from a higher authority than a lower authority.
Another thing which affects the amount of PR you receive (or the quality of the vote!) is the amount of other links on the page which you are getting linked from. If your page is the only age to get linked to then you will get 100% of the "vote", but if you are one of 10 links on a page you are getting linked from you will receive only 10% of the "vote. (these are not exact figures, and only serve as an illustration). So if you take this into consideration a single solitary link to your page from a page with a PR of 2 could be worth more than receiving a link from a PR5 page containing 20 other outgoing links. The same applies the other way around its better to get one on its own link from a PR5 page than 100 links from a pr 1 page. Your page "DOES NOT" leak PR so dont wory about giving out links, links to relevant sites wont affect your PR but will count toward the site you are linking to.
Award more Page Rank to the pages which count!
Digesting this aspect of how page rank works you can begin to understand the importance of internal linking and when to us the "Nofollow" attribute. This is an attribute you can use when creating links in your page, if you use the nofollow attribute the googlebot does not follow that link and doesnot award a "vote" to the page being linked to.
So for example if you had a page or a blog post with 10 links on, 8 of them were pointing towards an Amazon product and two were internal links to your blog each outgoing link would be 10% of the vote meaning your two internal links would only get a total of 20% PR vote from this page in effect "watering down" the quality of the link. If we use the nofollow attribute on the Amazon links this will tell the Googlebot not to follow these links and award the PR vote between the 2 internal links without the nofollow attribute. This means between them your two internal links will get 100% of the vote which will help with the PR of the pages they are pointing to. By nofollowing Amazon this does not affect them in any way as they do not rely on PR but does help you award more potential PR where it maters the next time the Googlebot trawls your site. To find out how to apply the nofollow attribute in your posts check out this post: Nofollow / Dofollow are you following?
Dont be greedy share the link love
Dofollow
All of your internal links
Links to other blogs
Links to other websites with quality content (a site you recommend)
Nofollow
Links to sites like amazon
Affiliate links
Paypal buttons
Social bookmarking buttons (see Antisocial Plugin)
Contact forms
So for a quick rundown of how to get more PR for your money
When you can, include internal links within your posts to other of your posts, this will help spread the link-juice/ link-love/ PR-vote etc, so that more of your blogs pages get a better PR. Also it will help visitors when looking for particualr information on your site. Dont put too may links on one page, this will "water down" the link-juice to the pages you are linking to. Make your links decriptive, use relevant Anchor Text this will help Google when people search for a particular phrase, the more descriptive the better!
This is not an exact science but should give you a basic understanding of what to follow and not to follow and how to use internal linking. This wont turn you blog into a PR 6 blog from a PR0 overnight or even at the next PR update but in the long term you will reap the benefits. A little here and a little there can make all the difference.
If you enjoyed this post please feel free to buy me a gingerbread late! mmmm!
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Hi Andy,
nice post about the effect of using the 'nofollow' attribute on links.
I also started to play around with adding 'nofollow' to several outgoing links as well as some internal links, but I guess I have to tweak a little bit more to squeeze some juice out of it.
Thanks, every little tweak counts! I've nofollowed sevral pages on andy-coates.com to gain a better PR on my blog page, it could meen the difference between an estimated PR4 or PR5!
I'm sure linking to posts would be a bit different from linking to a normal webpage. wish you could have talked about the code to use when linking to posts.
Hi, each post is just another web page, so the link works exactly the same. Regarding the code its just your usual "a href" tag which you would normally link with.
Hope that helps
Andy
From what i see you lose page rank by linking out. Is there a way you can structure the way you link out so that you don't lose page rank?
Also i've noticed pages with lower page rank, ranking higher than others with a higer page rank.
Is page rank still that important these days?
Page rank is generally important to advertisers as they are more likely to pay to advertise on a site with a higher page rank tan a one with a lower page rank.
Links out cont toward page rank but you don't effectively leak PR, the best way to link is use the no-follow attribute on certain outgoing links to sites with no real content, and continually link back to your own pages so you are effectively giving yourself links and voting PR for yourself.
I'm not quite sure by what you man when you say lower sites are ranking higher than higher ranked sites? Are you still talking google PR or other rankings such as Alexa etc?
Cheers
Andy
What i ment to say was, sites with pages of lower page rank were sometimes ranking higher on certain keywords than similar sites with a higher page rank. But i think you've answered my question that page rank is important for advertisers.
Is it true that sites that link to you with anchor text that are contained in your sites title will rank higher for that keyword than your site?
Ah! I see what you mean. Getting ranked for certain keywords is different to page rank.
If a site links to you using "descriptive" anchor text then this will help towards the search engine bringing up your site in a search for that specific keyword. The site linking to you will not necessarily rank higher than you, it all depends partially on incoming links and keywords in the text and titles.