Page Rank is a Google invented metric, made to describe the relevance, or strength, of a given page within a Google index. Page rank ranges from 0 to 10 with 10 being best.
Page rank is mainly gained by incoming links. Whenever a source is credited (linked to), its Page Rank rises, and the amount depends on the PR of a page giving the link ( google patented algorithm ).
In Google's eyes, higher ranked pages are more relevant for the topic they are ranking for, and as such are more likely to appear in the search results for the same topic. And good search engine results of course mean more visitors to your site, more clients for your business.
You can observe page rank with a browser add-on (check Firefox 3 Add-ons) or with free Google toolbar .
Page Rank Sculpting
Page rank flows from one page to another, with inbound links to the page adding to PR and outbound links 'leaking' it. By structuring the links on your pages, you can have influence on how the PR is spread on your site. This is called Page Rank Sculpting.
Here is one example. I want to give most importance to my posts and pages and less to the home page, archives and categories. Reason is that the home page content is usually not constant (for a usual blog at least) as articles come and go. So I would have hard time trying to rank that page for all my targeted keyword phrases. It is much more effective if I focus my efforts to specific posts each targeting one desired keyword. So what I want is my single pages receiving most of the page rank so they would rank higher for their specific topics.
You can bulk check your current page rank (multiple pages at once) using this free tool.
How is Page Rank Sculpting Achieved?
Most commonly used technique for page rank scuplting is using nofollow attribute with the links.
Here is a quote from Matt Cutts, Google employee:
"The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify Page Rank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt'ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level."
Official Google SEO guide also endorses usage of nofollow. They mention it in example of blog comments:
If your site has a blog with public commenting turned on, links within those comments could pass your reputation to pages that you may not be comfortable vouching for. Blog comment areas on pages are highly susceptible to comment spam. Nofollowing these user added links ensures that you're not giving your page's hard-earned reputation to a spammy site.
You want to put nofollow attribute to links to those pages that are not important on your blog, especially if those links appear on most of your pages (like header, footer and sidebar placed links). In practical terms, it can be links to Home, About, Contact, Guestbook pages then archives, categories, social bookmarking, RSS feed and similar low relevance pages.
Here is an example of a nofollowed link in HTML:
<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/about">About</a>
Use Pages for Important Information
Another way of page rank sculpting on a WordPress blog is having important content as pages instead of posts.
For most WordPress themes, 'pages' are listed in the sidebar meaning every your post will pass it's PR to these pages. This can be further tweaked, for example you can also add links to your relevant posts to the sidebar, by using widgets for example.
SEO Siloing with Categories and Tags
Another popular 'seo sculpting' technique is called SEO siloing. It is called this way because you are 'stuffing' one page with links coming from a lot of other pages.
Best example is naming a category after keywords you want to rank for, and then create a static category landing page that contains an article and also acts like a mini sitemap for all posts in that category. With all posts linking back to this page it gets a lot of Page Rank.
There is a handy WordPress plugin for SEO siliong available here.
SEO Silioing can also be used effectively with tags. Choose your tags wisely and avoid short one-word tags. When you are tagging an article try to think of a phrase someone would actually type in the search engine when they are searching about your topic.
Taking this technique to the next level involves creating a dedicated page that will only list your most important tags (20-30 for example). Advantage of this is that this page will be linked to from all pages of your site, meaning it will have considerable page rank on it's own. It will then pass this page rank to your most important tags, in addition to all other PR they are getting from posts that have these tags.
Controlling Page Rank with Comment Sculpting
I am not sure anyone used this term before so here is what I call Comment sculpting. Since page rank is achieved by getting inbound links and lost with outbound links, if one could automatically control these links they could influence the strength of the page.
Blogs have a feature that makes it easy to implement this kind of control and that is comments. Each comment usually has a date of the comment which serves as a link to the same page. With the increasing number of comments the number of outbound links is nullified by many inbound links coming from the comments.
So a page without any comments would equally spread it's incoming page rank to let's say 20 links in your header, sidebar and footer. But if that page has 50 comments, the effects of losing page rank will be much less because 50 of 70 links take the page rank back to the same page. This means that the pages with more comments have the potential to keep the incoming page rank better. Downside of this is that these comments may also take away some of the page relevance (depends on what comments are specifically if they are of 'nice post!' sort) so having a balance between page relevance and keeping PR is important. I found that 10 per page usually works well (you would need to implement comment paging with a plugin).
Hot Tip - Google Site Search
Part of the page rank sculpting effort is knowing which pages to promote. And what better signal can you get than the one from the users visiting your site. If you have a search box available, chance is it being used by visitors. Have you ever checked what they are searching for? If not you have been missing this important metric.
If you are using Google Analytics to track visitors to your site (and you should cause it's extra easy to setup and use) you can use a feature called Google Site Search.
It will work on a WordPress blog and allows you to have information about what did users coming to your site type in the search box (almost every WordPress theme has a search box).
Setting it up is super easy. Go to your main screen of Google Analytics, click Edit settings for the site you want to enable it. Then select Do Track Site Search and enter 's' as Query Parameter. See the picture below.
You can then monitor are visitors searching for on your site, or what they expect to find. This can be also a hint of the information that is not clearly accessible so you may want to rearrange links in your sidebar for example.
Conclusion
Page rank sculpting can be most powerful technique in your SEO arsenal when used properly. It's form of an art, take the chisel in your hands and sculpt your website into a beautiful SEO creation.
I enjoy working on WordPress SEO and Website Optimization. If you need such services, contact me for a chat!
42 Comments
I agree with Arnaud! I see a lot of site giving SEO advise and the first thing I do before I even read the article is check the ranking of the website.
Please don't try to tell me what you know about SEO when your website doesn't even have any page rank.
I use Google Analytics but was not aware of the search feature. Thanks for sharing that!
Linda
Great article. We will definitely try the no follow link. Still need to find more about tagging. We think we have highly optimised our site but we still position far back and worse still Google thinks 1000 of our pages are duplicates.
Upss correction.. I mean it is no effect between each other .. if i use both techniques..? :)
Miclee
Hi Vladimir, am i get the best result in SE if i practice page sculpting and tag sculpting at the same time..?
Best Regards
Miclee
Hi Vladimir
Great article but I'm still a beginner at this sort of stuff so I wondered if you might clarify something for me?
I've done what you suggested and named a category after keywords I want to rank for and created a static category landing page My first question is how do I make all posts link back to this page?
I'm using the SEO siloing plugin.
The second question is similar to the first. It's clear you recommend creating a dedicated page that will only list the most important tags but how do I get the pages to link to it? And is there a way to get the individual tags from the posts to link to the page too.
Sorry if these questions are v basic, hope you can help
Dave
Zdravo Vladimire :-)
Odlican blog!
I started to use it in order to increase my knowledge of wordpress.
I have a question about the no-follow attribute. Haven't tested it yet, but does it work with pingbacks? I mean, if i link to someone in my post and add a no-follow to the anchor tag, will the other blogger receive the ping-back?
Pozdrav
Now this is AWESOME post! Easy to understand and implement.
Thanks,
Mohsin
Great post! Thanks a lot!
Wealth of amazing information. Subscribed you RSS feed
hello
on the amazing grace theme, there is a default nofollow on categories or I messed up smth?
Because all my categories are nofollow and I can't figure out how to remove it. Thanks!
Well, with a PR 5, you can only follow the advises !
Thanks a lot
Arnaud
Great info Vladimir.
I have been shown many different formulas for leaking PR to different
pages on my site and blog and been told so many complicated ways that I just haven't even bothered with it because I was so confused by it all. I have added the nofollow tag to most of my outgoing links and to my internal links that are not significant, but I know that there is a lot more I could be doing that I don't really understand. Thank you for all the great info Vladimir!
P.S. I absolutely love your blog!
Hey, Vladimir, my name is raul, queria congratulate you for everything, if for all, the template is very good, I'm starting my way through the world of seo, and I find that really know the subject and know a lot. it was only that, congratulate you for everything you do and want to get over it and share it! Many thank you very much.
Your friend raul
Google founders Larry and Sergei developed it on Stanford and while you are right Stanford owns the patent, it's still them who made it. But technicalities are not important. When I say Google I a mean those two as they made it happen.
Hi Vladimir.
Not quite right on pagerank. Google does not hold any patent on Pagerank, and in fact doesn`t even own it, nor did they develop it.
Stanford University developed and owns the entire pagerank system, technology, and patents, and licensed it to Google for about 1.3 million Google shares.
This is a common mistake, and most people are led to believe it is Google property. It is not. They only have an exclusive license to use it.
Have a look on Wikipedia for details if you like.
Great WP plugins, and great blog!
Ron
Wow, I discovered a treasure trove about web development around WordPress. I have spent so much time reading through your posts; they provide such good and valuable information.
And thank you for your theme which I use on my personal blog. By the way, that's how I discovered this blog.
Great info - thanks! I can't find the GA Site search feature but I am probably looking in the wrong place.
Great stuff, keep it coming!
Thanks. I just updated my analytic settings. I look forward to seeing the results.
Much thanks for the information and advice. I've been working on making my site as accessible as possible to people who might be searching for the information and opinion I provide at plexAV. Grabbing your RSS feed!
Ken Stein
whoops I put this comment on the wrong page! please delete the duplicate on the smartlinks page - anyway the question refers to your points above abour siloing:
I have a question on Siloing. I am keen to have my blog broken down by area, eg backup, storage, servers, comms etc.
If I were to list only categories with descriptions on the home page and then have the 2nd tier as category pages followed by the posts themselves does this become a silo and is it any good?
I don’t want to use “pages” as I don’t want to be fully dependant on google for visitors etc.
I ask because I read about silos and the “master plan” by Charles Heffner and they seem to link articles in a strange way.
Yout blog looks very nice and is very informative.
I got to it by a link from Joost!
Thanks for the tip on tracking your visitors searches with google analytics. I did not even know that function exist prior to reading your post.
Updated the article today with info on comment sculpting.
Thanks for the compliments.
As for your question I can not confirm anything 100% as this information is classified obviously.
But I was building my most important links on header and sidebar and neglected the footer and this has worked great for me.
Footer tends to attract a lot of unwanted and spammy links and if I was google this would be the first area I would be cutting off.
Vladimir,
Excellent post. I read a lot of SEO blogs and you are first to deemphasize home page PR.(that I have read). I agree, you want to send traffic to individual post/pages not home page where content is always scrolling off.
I didn't know you could use GA for site search tracking . I have been using Search Meter plugin for that.
I am trying out your theme 'Amazing Grace' It looks terrific.
Question, is there a difference in PR weighting of top menu vs bottom menu vs links in sidebar? Where should I put most important pages?