On-Site Link Building Strategy

pagerank, page rank

The values on this page utilize the Google Page Rank Calculator tool that helps us understand how Google will adjust page rank on your site after each iteration (indexing of your sites pages).

To keep things simple, we will consider a 3 page site (pages A, B and C) with no links coming in from the outside. We will allocate each page an initial Page Rank of 1.  The site's maximum Page Rank is the amount of Page Rank in the site. In this case, we have 3 pages so the site's maximum is 3.

At the moment, none of the pages link to any other pages and none link to them. If you make the calculation once for each page, you'll find that each of them ends up with a Page Rank of 0.15. No matter how many iterations you run, each page's Page Rank remains at 0.15. The total Page Rank in the site = 0.45, whereas it could be 3. The site is seriously wasting most of its potential Page Rank.



Example 1 pagerank, page rank

Now begin again with each page being allocated PR1. Link page A to page B and run the calculations for each page. After 100 iterations the figures are:-
Page A = 0.15
Page B = 0.2775
Page C = 0.15

Page A has "voted" for page B and, as a result, page B's Page Rank has increased.  The total Page Rank in the site is now 0.5775 - slightly better but still only a fraction of what it could be.



Example 2 pagerank, page rank

Try this linkage. Link all pages to all pages. Each page starts with PR1 again. This produces:-
Page A = 1
Page B = 1
Page C = 1

Now we've achieved the maximum. No matter how many iterations are run, each page always ends up with PR1. The same results occur by linking in a loop. E.g. A to B, B to C and C to D.  This clearly illustrates that poor linking will substantially waste Page Rank.



Example 3 pagerank, page rank

What if we don't particularly want all the site's pages to have an equal share. It is more likely that we want the Home and Primary Category pages to have increased rank.. With only 3 pages, we can channel the Page Rank to the index page by simply not linking pages B & C together. and after 100 iterations, the results are:-
Page A = 1.459459
Page B = 0.7702703
Page C = 0.7702703

The Total Page Rank in the site is still 3 (the maximum). Page A has a much larger proportion of the Page Rank than the other 2 pages. We  channeled a large proportion of the site's Page Rank to where we wanted it.



Example 4 pagerank, page rank

Finally, keep the previous links and add a link from page C to page B. Start again with PR1 all round.  Page C now shares its "vote" between A and B. Previously A received all of it. That's why page A has lost some rank while page B has gained and after 100 iterations:-
Page A = 1.298245
Page B = 0.9999999
Page C = 0.7017543

 



Examples summary

You can see that, by organizing the internal links, it is possible to channel a site's existing Page Rank to selected pages. Internal links can be arranged to suit a site's Page Rank needs.