Popular Wealth - Pagerank and Nofollow - A Study On How To Micro Manage PR

Disclaimer: This article is going to inform you in detail, in a webmaster approved way, on how to manage internal pagerank to an extreme degree. Long read.

I am NOT responsible for your site if you mess it up!

On May 15th, 2006 Matt Cutts of Googles webspam team made a Quick Comment On Nofollow. In his article he commented that “I’d be the first to say that nofollow isn’t perfect.” and that “In an ideal world, nofollow would only be for untrusted links.”. I began experimenting and performing controlled studies in earnest after reading that post, and after reading subsequent posts on his blog about pagerank and nofollow. The term “Micro Manage Internal PR” is also borrowed from his blog.

After much trial and error the end result was impressive. Page one results for the hobby sites primary keyword out of over 77 million results, nearly 500 top 20 results for lesser primary keywords. Since then the site has picked up many links and as such micro managing pagerank is no longer as beneficial. As you’ll see this study is particularly effective on newer sites with less PR to manage.

Enter the age of micro managing PR - some basics.
The only truth I’d like you to hold onto from here on is that your websites index page is the strongest in terms of having pagerank. It will outrank all of your interior pages barring some very specific factors, such as incoming links, so for the purposes of demonstration we’ll assume we’re talking about a website with no incoming links whatsoever, just to make things easy. Beyond that you are free to pump up, or pump down, the pagerank value of ANY internal page, category, tag or fluff page at will. If you don’t know how to raise your index page PR, much less control your internal page PR, don’t worry - I’ll try to make it clear.

Step #1 - Cleaning up the fluff.
Before we start micro-managing internal PR lets plug some basic holes first. Add rel=”nofollow” tags to links that lead to privacy policy and terms of use type pages. Additionally list these types of pages on your robots.txt file to help search engines that don’t read the nofollow tag. Using the robots.txt file alone on these links is not enough. Without nofollow you still pass pagerank to these pages even if they don’t get indexed, the PR is wasted.

Step #2 - Analyze your specific website requirements.
Decide which pages you want the most pagerank on. If you want them all indexed equally you will be able to plan for that but it’s likely that none will rank in the top three positions for the desired keyword/s. Do you want a site that has a Pagerank of 6 on the index and nothing anywhere else or would you prefer a pagerank of 4-5 on the index and 2-4 on many key pages? You WILL have to decide in advance and your internal page structure and use of nofollow make it very possible for you chose, you’ll see. The most important pages of your site are the index page, the category pages and the individual articles. When you’ve mastered the art of micro managing pagerank you’ll realise that to rank well for some keywords you do not need much PR but for others you need a lot. You’ll also realise that you simply CANNOT rank all articles highly, the more you have, the more pagerank is stretched out among them. The more stretched out the pagerank is, the more your site will need to rely on incoming links. Don’t worry, you should be managing these like a nascar pitboss in a little while.

Note: You WILL want to ask several experts for their opinions about your specific goals and don’t ask just one because one companies marketing plan will differ from the marketing strategy of another, you want LOTS of opinions in advance because there are lots of different internet marketing opinions, get LOTS of them and eliminate as you advance. Emphasis on LOTS and don’t say “but the other company said” because you want to keep them honest and pick some brains.

Step#3 - Understanding the average website
The average website, or wordpress blog, has an index page, a few categories and varying amounts of articles in each category (more on tags later). The highest PR value is found on the index page because all internal pages link to it. The second highest PR value is found on the category pages because again all pages link to them. The third highest PR value is found on the articles that are on page one of the category pages because they get the full value from their category page. The lowest amount of PR can be found on articles that reside on page two or beyond of the categories since they don’t have a direct link from their category page. So far we have three sets of pages and four levels of pagerank.

Step #4 - Understanding the flow of PR on the average website
The average index page passes PR to it’s category pages, the category pages then pass PR to the individual articles. Since the articles, with the exception of articles currently on the index page, are last in the line of pagerank flow it would be easy to assume that to boost their pagerank value you need to send more PR “juice” directly to them from the index page. This is a common myth. Attempting to bypass the category pages by creating links directly from the index page to individual articles is actually a classic and very widespread mistake. The reason: you drain pagerank from the index page for a limited benefit to a handful of articles.

A better solution would be not to add article links to your index page, essentially leave the index alone, and instead drain some of the category pagerank value onto the articles. But how can you do that since the category pages are in the middle? It’s very simple, link articles together. If you link articles together you lower the pagerank value that they send back to your index and category pages and at the same time you help boost the value of all article pages. The end result is an index page with slightly less pagerank, category pages with substantially less pagerank and you’ve changed the dynamics I described in step three. It’s very possible to only slightly lower your index pagerank value, dramatically lower your category pagerank values and end up with articles that rank more highly than category pages.

Wow, I didn’t know you could drain category pagerank like that!
Almost every client I’ve had who took the time to ask me questions until they understood this concept ALWAYS ends up asking “Why not drain it all by linking all articles to each other?”. The answer is because the index page does not link directly to the articles. Too few links between articles results in too much pagerank sitting on category pages. The opposite is also true, too many links between articles results in too little pagerank on category pages, the law of diminishing returns kicks in fairly quickly as the value of category pages diminishes. It’s possible to “starve” articles by taking too much from categories.

At this point I suggest you search for an SEO Guru on your favorite search engine and ask specific questions about optimal crosslinking and site size. I already know what you’re going to hear, it actually depends on what you type into your search engine when looking it up too. Really! I had some fun with this. example: if you look up search engine optimization services you will get one set of answers. Next look up search engine optimization company and you’ll get a different answer because you’ll be given a different set of search results. Next try search engine optimization consultant and a third set of answers will be provided. I guarantee it, i’ve done it myself just for fun. Heck, look up affordable search engine optimization services and you’ll get another answer altogether just because of the word affordable. If you feel confused, don’t fret, as I hope that illustrated there is a LOT of different opinions on the subject… and i’m right! (i’m modest, really)

Ok, lots of opinions, but how many links I should create between articles?
This is simple. On a site with few pages (100 or less) one or two links from each article to other articles works wonders. On a site with more pages (100-1,000) four or five links from each article to other articles provides optimum results. 1,000-10,000 = five or six. 10,000 -100,000 = six or seven. I’m giving you these figures to demonstrate that it is NOT linear. It’s not linear because the number of category pages does not change if you have 100 pages or 100,000 pages. Also note that these optimal values are based on wanting solid index page PR and wanting to optimally boost individual article PR at the cost of Category page PR. It also assumes that you want individual articles to be equal with each other by having an equal number of links to each article from other articles. If you need a handful of articles to stand above the rest, direct more links from other articles to them. This is where competition, incoming links and other factors come into play. You have decisions to make on which articles to pump up and which to bleed.

I’m so lost - I just can’t visualise this.
Fortunately WebWorkshop.net has this Excellent Visual Pagerank Calculator. If you are serious about wanting to micro manage pagerank until you can control it like a grandmaster you owe it to yourself to spend a few hours playing with that tool. The instructions are clear and when you’ve got a good idea on how you want your site built you can even test the effects of incoming and outgoing links. Keep in mind that the pr values are not set in stone, they are approximations and you’re more interested in ratios.

In case WebWorkshop.net ever disappears here are some examples.
#1 - Index links to 3 categories. Categories do not link to each other. Each category links to 5 articles. Articles do not link to each other or cats. Everything links back to index. Results: Index = PR6.5, Cat = PR2, page = PR0.5

#2 - Index links to 3 categories. Categories DO link to each other (like with most wordpress blogs). Each category links to 5 articles. Articles do not link to each other or cats. Everything links back to index. Results: Index = PR6, Cat = PR2.3, page = PR0.4. Simply linking categories together raises them by 10% in PR.

#3 - Typical wordpress install, everything links to index and categories, no plugins. Note that categories outrank the index page in theory BUT regular excerpt duplicates, lack of unique titles and other standard wordpress install conditions reduce actual category PR a great deal. Low index PR.

#4 - A balanced approach would involve having all articles link to 5 other articles evenly and to the index page but not to category pages. Category pages and article pages would then have relatively similar PR values with the index page carrying twice their wieght. Although ideal it’s not realistic to expect even article PR distribution while keeping links relevant, at least not without a lot of article planning in advance. Index PR = 2, Category and article PR = 1.

As you can see in the examples you can more than double and in some cases triple pagerank using simple internal link planning. Incoming links dramatically alter the PR values. The index page ultimately gets the most benefit from incoming links. If one of your pages ranks #1 in search engines and continues to draw incoming links you can offload some of the wasted PR (you can’t get better than #1 us serps) by adding links from that page to other important ones.

Hey, Wait a minute, this isn’t about nofollow anymore.
If you were thinking that by this point, very good, but wait - it is (and it’s very simple). When you decide on your internal link structure use nofollow on links that don’t comply (remember not to “cut off” any page completely). That fancy plugin that pulls up random posts on your index page? Nofollow it before it pulls up a damaging page during a spider crawl. That plugin thats displaying links from articles to 20 other articles on your 100 page site? Nofollow 15-16 of them pronto to give your categories some CPR (exact number depends on competition). Your particular site needs to constantly link to a specific article but that article is already #1 in the serps? Start using nofollow on newer links to that page. Consider nofollow the ultimate tool to compliment a proper internal link structure.

Now I’m WAY confused - whats the perfect setup?
Now thats the million dollar question and unfortunately the answer is that there absolutely cannot be a perfect universal setup. It’s physically impossible but hey, now you know why SEO’s make so much! I like to use the gatorade example with customers when they can’t get their mind around it not being possible to have a perfect template. It goes something like this.

You have a gatorade bottle full of PR juice and a thirsty website. You don’t have nearly enough juice to feed each page enough for them all to reach #1 in search engines. Knowing some (most) pages will remain thirsty you decide which ones absolutely MUST reach #1 in the serps. Your list in hand you begin pouring PR juice onto the first page on your list (the index page). Cool, it just reached #100.. a little more juice and it’s #50… then #40…. all the way to #1 and STOP! Lets not waste a drop more than we need to, a quick look at the bottle and it’s still half full! Onto the second page, and the third until we’re out of juice.

Since every website is different and every keyword takes varying amounts of juice to beat the competition you can put on your thinking cap and try to come up with a strategy. You noticed that the first 25% of your bottle of PR juice got you to position #6 but it took an entire 25% to grab #1. Could you have used that 25% to drive 10 lesser keywords to #1 instead? Probably! So which will draw more visitors. a #1 ranking on ONE keyword or a #6 ranking on that one plus a #1 on ten smaller ones. More often than not option #2 is best. As you can see, micro managing PR to maximize total visitors to your site is about much more than proper linking and use of nofollow tags.

I mentioned my 300 page hobby site earlier on. When I got it to rank #4 I had only 112 top twenty secondary keywords. At rank #6 it had 228 top twenty secondaries. A little lower and now it fluctuates between #7 and #19 (the lower you go, the more other sites can make your results fluctuate) but it has aprox 500 searchable terms ranking well and gets more traffic there. #1 is NOT what its cracked up to be in terms of traffic. I also managed to ease off on nofollow by organizing categories properly, now if only I had more hours in the day to write more articles for it.

Other considerations
- The ENTIRE spectrum of SEO factors comes into play but they are ALL secondary. In the end a site with a wasteful internal link structure and no PR management via nofollow will be hard pressed to compete with even a smaller site thats properly built no matter how many SEO tactics are utilized.

- I mentioned Tags, consider them equal to categories. Most article pages will not support linking to the index, categories and 10+ tags all at once. Consider using nofollow for tagclouds on single pages if you use a sitewide tag cloud. It’s also important not to repeat a category name as a tag name, your site will be hard pressed to rank both a tag and category page of the same name well and so PR built up in one will be wasted.

- The wordpress “similar posts” plugin is great at linking articles together however know that it isn’t as intuitive as manually linking pages yourself, you will end up with some ignored pages and others with a lot of pagerank.

- Consider not linking articles to categories. The average wordpress template has categories in the sidebar, as such you can create a second identical copy of your “sidebar.php” page, rename it sidebar2.php if you like. Then from your “single.php” page use an if/else command to call “sidebar.php” from the home page and “sidebar2.php” from category and single pages. Use nofollow on sidebar2.php.

Wildcards
- Google human staff may “adjust” your results causing you major headaches to figure out whats going on and why. Afterall, when you have some control over PR and one page you know is optimized acts like a dud… somethings up. Could be you, could be them, could be tough competition, it’s likely you but you get the idea.

- Filters are in place limiting just how much micro management is possible. Age of site for example seems to play a part. I couldn’t rank my hobby site for beans at first.

- Adjustments are never ending. You need a little more juice here, you might have some to spare there etc. Worse, when a particular keyword has extremely knowledgeable SEO’s battling each other their efforts offset each other and it comes down to less controllable factors like number/quality of incoming links.

- Sheer volume of incoming links can negate even the biggest website issues so attempting to use ANY micro managing techniques on an existing site with solid incoming links will mean skipping the planning stage. Those sites are firmly in “adjust a little here, trim a little there” mode which isn’t ideal. A good baseline comes from proper planning in advance.

- Tools that show you how well your keywords rank, like those found at SEOdigger.com, are extremely useful when micro managing Pagerank. The SEODigger site tells you which keywords you rank in the top 20 search results for. When you apply micro managing to those top 20 results you can choose to place links from the pages that rank #11-20 to the pages that rank #2-10 to hopefully achieve several more #1 rankings. On the flip side you can chose to place links from the #1 results to a few #2 and #3 ranking keywords to raise those. Perhaps you want to drain all #1 and #2 results just enough to bring up other articles to #3 to see if that brings more traffic. As you can see, knowing how to micro manage is extremely useful. Please don’t link willy nilly or you’ll undo yourself. Relative links only!

For transparencies sake I have no affiliation with SEODigger.com, it’s just a good tool, and if you know of other good tools please take a moment to add them to The Best Blog Tools of 2008 by leaving a comment over there. Thanks.

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