23Oct/100

PageRank Sculpting

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After my article on how many pages does your site have indexed there was some interest generated in how to actually go about getting more pages included in the index.  The easy answer to that is to get a few links pointing to pages on your site that aren't in the index, but another problem could be your site design.  PageRank sculpting is a trick that is used by webmasters to try and flow as much pagerank as possible to important pages, and to keep pages like privacy, login, register, terms of service, and contact us out of the index.

Nofollow

Back in 2009, Google changed how they view the nofollow attribute and posted this information on the Matt Cutts blog.  It used to be that if you wanted to keep the search engines from indexing a page you could use nofollow.  So if you had 10 links on a page and five of them were nofollowed, the other five links would get twice as much juice.  Now it seems that Google still divides the pagerank by all outgoing links, but it just doesn't pass Pagerank to those links with the nofollow attribute, that pagerank just disappears.

Consolidating Links

Why not put similar information all on one page?  If you link to the same page more than once, Google only passes the pagerank one time.  So why not combine your login/register forms to a single page, the terms of service, privacy, and disclaimer to one legal page, and the about, bio, contact, and press information all on one?

To do this you have to be able to place an anchor in those pages.  So when the user clicks privacy, they get taken to the privacy section of your legal page.  Here is how to do it:

The anchor placed in your code where you want the link to jump to:  <a name="yourNamedAnchor"></a>

Then in your menu the link should be:  <a href="yourpage.html#yourNamedAnchor">TEXT HERE</a>

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