Let me first start off by saying that if you want to really get a deep understanding of the topic you should study what Leslie Rhode or Matt Cutts has to say on the topic of site structure for Page Rank sculpting. But, I’ll try to give you at least a basic understanding.
A quick “why”: We want to increase the page rank on certain pages of our Web site so they will show up in the search results more, (because they’re worth more to the Web-surfing public).
PageRank is calculated all the time. I know that if you have one of the many page-rank plugins for various browsers it seems like your page-rank is not calculated much at all so to read that it’s calculated all the time seems a bit off. Well, that’s true and false at the same time. Google only reports new page rank once every 3 to 4 months. BUT, actual page rank is constantly being updated(1). Think of the page-rank that shows up in your Web browser as a quarterly report on what you’ve accomplished over the last 4 months.
Quick summary of what PageRank, (PR), is: PR is a report of value assessment given to a Web page based upon the value of that page to the rest of the Web-surfing world. Right or wrong, the value is derived from other pages that point to your page and their PR value. A link from a PR 5 page is about 10 times more valuable than a link from a PR 4 page. However, each link from any page will dilute the value of that page and the value of the link from that page. So, too many links outbound from that PR 5 page and it can become less valuable than a link from the PR 4 page and so on.
We are going to assume, for now, that each page carries a value of one, (see figure 1). If we have two pages that have no inbound or outbound links then we can assume that figure 1 is an accurate representation of each of those page’s current PageRank.
Next, we’re going to assume that there is one link from page A to page B, (see figure 1.1). If you put a link on your page to another page who’s value is also one then that increases the value of the page you are linking to by .5 thereby leaving the original page with a value of .5 and the new page with an increased PR of 1.5. Page rank is a zero sum game. There is only a certain amount of page rank available, (unless of course you create more pages since each page is assigned value as soon as Google indexes it).
That is PR in a nutshell. Now, how do you get your “site” to have more page rank? Well, you will of course understand that it’s called PageRank and not site rank for a reason. Some pages are worth more than others; even on your site…or at least there should be. We’ll discuss how to increase your PageRank using off-page factors later. Right now we want to figure out this whole link structure thingy.
I started with discussing PageRank for a reason. The fact is that most Web site structure looks like a kaleidoscope, (see figure 1.2). Kaleidoscope link structure is very pretty but it’s pretty useless for PR sculpting. 
In the Kaleidoscope link structure, all pages link to one another thereby sending page rank to circulate without any focus whatsoever. We want to focus our page rank to the pages that are most valuable to our business.
If I sell widgets online then I want to rank for widgets or variations of widgets like blue widgets, green widgets, small widgets, large widgets, etc. I will have a better chance of ranking for widgets if my widget pages have higher page rank. My “Contact Us” or “About Us” pages will probably not rank for widgets nor do I want them to; so, I’m going to change my link structure so I can focus more page rank to my widget pages. (I’m not suggesting that we don’t link to our “Contact Us” page; we’ll get to that soon, I promise.)
Ok, so then how do I set up my site to move PageRank effectively? That’s an excellent question I asked you. Thank you for thinking it!
Step one, you need to decide how you want the PR to flow. Do you want PR more focused on category pages that then link to product pages? Do you want to focus your PR so that your product pages rank higher? Or, do you want to make sure that all your PR gets pushed back to the home page? There are no wrong answers here unless you said, “David, I want to send all my page rank to my competition.” Bad idea; but who am I to judge.
Ok, I’m going to assume that you’re going after more of the long-tail search results and you want to push your page rank to your product pages.
We will start on the home page because that’s the most logical place to start. In figure 1.3 we show a home page and 3 product pages all independent of each other. There are no links to or from any of these pages. Notice the PageRank of each page is set to one (1).
Now we are going to add our first navigation links from the home page to see the affect on our PageRank.
Notice in figure 1.4, (below), the home-page’s PageRank decreased. All the PageRank that is on the home page is being split up 4 ways. To the three product pages and the home page itself will keep an equal amount of the PR.
Figure 1.4 also tells us that there are only one way links from the home page to each of the product pages. One way links simply mean that there are links going to product pages from the home page; but on the product pages there are no links back to the home page, (hang in there, we’re going to put links back to the home page soon but we have to do it a special way so we don’t unintentionally move PageRank back to the home page).
In the next figure we can see how PageRank starts to “flow” the more you focus your PageRank. Figure 1.5 shows us that if we have just one link from ‘product page E’ to ‘product page F’ the PR from ‘E’ is now half of what it was and the difference is sent to ‘F’. So, our new page rank is 0.625 for ‘product page E’ and 1.87 is the new PR for ‘product page F’.
These calculations are for example only so we can see how PageRank flows. The real calculation is pretty complex. The point here is that we are assuming that each page initially held a value of PR1. So, in figure 1.5 we clearly see that the page rank from ‘product page E’ is flowing to ‘product page F’ which now has a PR value of 1.875.
Now, in figure 1.6 we focus our PR to ‘product page D’ thereby making it the focus of the site and giving it most of the page rank because there are no outbound links from ‘product page D’.
CONTINUOUS CALCULATION: Ok, this next part gets a little crazy but clearly in figure 1.6 we can see that the page rank if focused on ‘product page D’. Now, when we link back to ‘product page E’ we are going to see the pages balance. Obviously, if we just carried over the same logic we would see ‘product page E’ with much more page rank even though all inbound and outbound links are equal in all 3 of the product pages.
Keep in mind that the page rank is a continuous calculation and a link from a lower PR page is worth less than a link from a higher PR page. This calculation will continue until the pages will have a balanced page rank.
Two way links work the same way as the link structure in 1.7 with the difference being that we can control the flow of page rank with more or less links.
Figure 1.8 shows us that a reciprocal link from ‘product page D’ and ‘product page F’, while diluting themselves, actually shifts page rank from ‘product page E’. this happens because the link from ‘product page D’ to ‘product page F’ dilutes the value of the link from ‘product page D’. Since the inbound link from ‘product page D’ is weaker in PageRank strength, ‘product page E’ has less overall page rank. (ok, I admit, that twisted my brain a little too)
For ease of explanation, figure 1.8 shows us now that there are 3 links to ‘product page F’, 2 links to ‘product page D’ and 2 to ‘product page E’ but the overall link value to ‘product page E’ is less valuable than to both ‘product page D’ and ‘product page F’. 
Is your head spinning yet? I hope not. I hope the graphics are helping because we’re going to need all the help we can get from here on out. 
ok, so…that’s how we set up proper link structure.
As mentioned before, there are a couple reasons to do this.
- We want to increase the PageRank of the pages that we hope are going to rank higher in organic search results because the higher the PageRank the more important our page is to the Web-surfing world.
- We control how our pages are indexed so that we make better use of Link Text on our site. (more on that in a bit)
Let’s assume that we want to sell more of our blue widgets because we make more money on blue widgets. ‘Product page F’ in figure 1.8 is our blue widget page. We have successfully structured the site so that we can increase the PageRank of our blue widgets page. Unfortunately, there are no links to any other pages but I want Web-surfers to be able to find the other pages on the Web site.
So, how do I put other links on a page without losing PageRank? Good question; I’m glad I asked it for you.
Google came up with a tag to combat comment spam in blog posts. It looks like this: <a href=”http://www.ocwebmarketing.com/do-not-follow.html” rel=”nofollow”>Link Text</a>
The red rel=”nofollow” goes in the in ‘a‘ tag after the URL. We use nofollow to tell the search engine spider not to follow that link because we don’t want it to be indexed. “Rel” is a relationship tag; it tells the search engine what the relationship of the link is to your Web site. As an example, if you use rel=”me” you are telling the search engine that it’s another one of your Web sites. (We’ll go over rel in more detail another time)
There are other ways you can avoid search engines spidering a page, (like using dynamic linking and other javascript links), but we are sooooo going to avoid all that and just use nofollow.
Ok, so can you show me a diagram of how the nofollow command works?
I’m glad I asked that question for you… 
In figure 1.9, we see we can effectively link back to the home page by inserting nofollow, (the red arrow is the nofollow link).
By using nofollow in our ‘product page D’ code, we have effectively told the search engine not to index that page.
Why don’t you want the search engine to spider that page? Well, maybe you do. But, no matter what you do, you don’t want to tell the search engine that your home page is about “Home”. Unless it is…but it’s not. “Home” is not a good description of any page I have ever coded. (This is the second part of the aforementioned reasons)
So, if you DO want to link to your home page so that search engine will spider it, (because a lot of the time the search engine will find another page on your site first), you simply add the link to the bottom of the page using Link Text that matches what you want the page to rank for. Here’s an example: <a href=”http://www.ocwebmarketing.net/index.html”>Blue Widgets</a>
The blue text “Blue Widgets” link text is telling the search engine that the link to your index page is about “blue widgets” instead of telling the search engine it’s about “home”. That’s just good SEO.
Of course, that last link for “good SEO” brings up another point. Don’t link spam. Google is smarter than that. You can have several search optimized links on a page but don’t use multiple links on any one page to point to any single page on your site. For clarification…don’t use ‘blue widgets’ and ‘green widgets on the same page to link to your home page. You can put a ‘blue widgets’ link to your home page on a product page, (as an example); and you can put a ‘green widgets’ link to your home page on another product page…but never on the same page.
In figure 2.0 we see a possible page structure that has been properly linked so the user gets the navigation structure that he or she expects from a Web site but also has search engine friendly link text. The red links at the top utilize nofollow and the blue links are “spider food“.
Clearly, the “Home”, “About us”, and “Contact us” pages are linked properly and positioned where everyone expects them to be. Plus, the link text at the bottom is what the search engines will use to spider those pages, (if you want them spidered at all).
As a general rule, I never pass PageRank to pages that serve no search optimization purpose, (like the about us or the contact us page). As far as PageRank is concerned, the About Us page is always a one-way street headed out out of town.
If you have any questions, comments, or corrections (hopefully not corrections), please post in the comments section and I’ll address them as soon as possible.
Take care,
David
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