seo
posted in search engine optimization  on 13 May 2007
by Andrew Lang 
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Monitor your website's link equity

It's a good idea to understand how your PR (PageRank) value spreads throughout the pages of your site. The page with the highest PR on your website is most likely to be the home page as this is the page that has the most external links pointing to it.

The pages within your site that are linked-to from your home page will inherit some of the PR from the home page. However, there's only so much 'link equity' to go around. If your home page has 100 links pointing to 100 pages within your site, each link will inherit far less PR than a home page with 20 links pointing to 20 pages.

If this sounds complicated, there's a useful tool to use that visually tells you how your PR 'link equity' is shared throughout your site:-

http://www.iwebtool.com/visual_pagerank

Type in your home page URL, and away you go. Look at the numbers next to each link - that's the PR value of the page being linked to.

To reiterate, don't put too many links on your home page - fewer links mean more PR value being passed onto the pages that are linked-to from your home page. Also, place the most important links closer to the top of the page.

A lot of website owners consider their 'links page' (the page used to link to external sites) to be the least important page, and they hide it away at the bottom. This is a bad idea, because it invariably gives the links page next to nothing in terms of PR value - which does nothing to attract quality link partners when they find out the links page is PR0-2. If you have a links page that is PR3+ you can create a virtuous circle of getting more and more quality link partners, which ultimately will increase the PR of your website.
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