Tips
Domain names and Filenames
To a spider, www.domain.com/,
domain.com/, www.domain.com/index.html and domain.com/index.html are different urls
and, therefore, different pages. Surfers arrive at the site's
home page whichever of the urls are used, but spiders see them
as individual urls, and it makes a difference when working out
the PageRank. It is better to standardize the url you use for
the site's home page. Otherwise each url can end up with a
different PageRank, whereas all of it should have gone to just
one url.
If you think about it, how can a spider know the filename
of the page that it gets back when requesting www.domain.com/ ? It can't. The filename
could be index.html, index.htm, index.php, default.html, etc.
The spider doesn't know. If you link to index.html within the
site, the spider could compare the 2 pages but that seems
unlikely. So they are 2 urls and each receives PageRank from
inbound links. Standardizing the home page's url ensures that
the Pagerank it is due isn't shared with ghost urls.
Example: Go to my UK Holidays
and UK Holiday Accoommodation site - how's that for a nice
piece of link text ;). Notice that the url in the browser's
address bar contains "www.". If you have the Google Toolbar
installed, you will see that the page has PR5. Now remove the
"www." part of the url and get the page again. This time it
has PR1, and yet they are the same page. Actually, the
PageRank is for the unseen frameset page.
When this article was first written, the non-www URL had
PR4 due to using different versions of the link URLs within
the site. It had the effect of sharing the page's PageRank
between the 2 pages (the 2 versions) and, therefore, between
the 2 sites. That's not the best way to do it. Since then,
I've tidied up the internal linkages and got the non-www
version down to PR1 so that the PageRank within the site
mostly stays in the "www." version, but there must be a site
somewhere that links to it without the "www." that's causing
the PR1.
Imagine the page, www.domain.com/index.html. The index page
contains links to several relative urls; e.g. products.html and details.html. The spider sees those urls as
www.domain.com/products.html and
www.domain.com/details.html. Now
let's add an absolute url for another page, only this time
we'll leave out the "www." part - domain.com/anotherpage.html. This page
links back to the index.html page, so the spider sees the
index pages as domain.com/index.html.
Although it's the same index page as the first one, to a
spider, it is a different page because it's on a different
domain. Now look what happens. Each of the relative urls on
the index page is also different because it belongs to the
domain.com/ domain. Consequently, the
link stucture is wasting a site's potential PageRank by
spreading it between ghost pages.

Adding new pages
There is a possible negative effect of adding new pages.
Take a perfectly normal site. It has some inbound links from
other sites and its pages have some PageRank. Then a new page
is added to the site and is linked to from one or more of the
existing pages. The new page will, of course, aquire PageRank
from the site's existing pages. The effect is that, whilst the
total PageRank in the site is increased, one or more of the
existing pages will suffer a PageRank loss due to the new page
making gains. Up to a point, the more new pages that are
added, the greater is the loss to the existing pages. With
large sites, this effect is unlikely to be noticed but, with
smaller ones, it probably would.
So, although adding new pages does increase the total
PageRank within the site, some of the site's pages will lose
PageRank as a result. The answer is to link new pages is such
a way within the site that the important pages don't suffer,
or add sufficient new pages to make up for the effect (that
can sometimes mean adding a large number of new pages), or
better still, get some more inbound links.
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Miscellaneous
The Google toolbar
If you have the Google
toolbar installed in your browser, you will be used to seeing
each page's PageRank as you browse the web. But all isn't
always as it seems. Many pages that Google displays the
PageRank for haven't been indexed in Google and certainly
don't have any PageRank in their own right. What is happening
is that one or more pages on the site have been indexed and a
PageRank has been calculated. The PageRank figure for the
site's pages that haven't been indexed is allocated on the fly
- just for your toolbar. The PageRank itself doesn't exist.
It's important to know this so that you can avoid
exchanging links with pages that really don't have any
PageRank of their own. Before making exchanges, search for the
page on Google to make sure that it is indexed.
Sub-directories
Some people believe that Google
drops a page's PageRank by a value of 1 for each sub-directory
level below the root directory. E.g. if the value of pages in
the root directory is generally around 4, then pages in the
next directory level down will be generally around 3, and so
on down the levels. Other people (including me) don't accept
that at all. Either way, because some spiders tend to avoid
deep sub-directories, it is generally considered to be
beneficial to keep directory structures shallow (directories
one or two levels below the root).
ODP and Yahoo!
It used to be thought that Google
gave a Pagerank boost to sites that are listed in the Yahoo!
and ODP (a.k.a. DMOZ) directories, but these days general
opinion is that they don't. There is certainly a PageRank gain
for sites that are listed in those directories, but the reason
for it is now thought to be this:-
Google spiders the directories just like any other site and
their pages have decent PageRank and so they are good inbound
links to have. In the case of the ODP, Google's directory is a
copy of the ODP directory. Each time that sites are added and
dropped from the ODP, they are added and dropped from Google's
directory when they next update it. The entry in Google's
directory is yet another good, PageRank boosting, inbound
link. Also, the ODP data is used for searches on a myriad of
websites - more inbound links!
Listings in the ODP are free but, because sites are
reviewed by hand, it can take quite a long time to get in. The
sooner a working site is submitted, the better. For tips on
submitting to DMOZ, see this this DMOZ article.
Comments and suggestions
Comments and suggestions
are welcomed. Please email me if you
have any.
Further information and resources
Another PageRank Explained article (by Ian Rogers):
here
Internet marketing articles, tips, tricks and secrets: here