This question was asked in a forum recently: "I have a directory site and heard about the concept of 'leaking PR' recently. ie. because of all the outgoing links. Is their any way of reducing this whilst still having 'true url's'?"

Now if you are going to use 'true url' you are always going to leak some Page rank.
However you can limit this in a few ways, in my mind the best way to do this is to make the directory deeper so it takes longer to get to the pages with the outgoing links.

Say you have a directory that looks like this:

HOME > CARS

and the links out of the website is on CARS page you will lose quite a bit of PR however if you build like this:

HOME > VEHICLES > CARS > FORDS

and have all the ford links out of the site on the fords page you will achieve two things. Your website will become much larger which will mean it have have a bigger base PR also it will leak only a fraction of the Page rank that it did perviously.

The same logic applies here to all websites, if you make the website larger not only can you limit how much Page rank you are losing but you can also increase the base Page rank that your website. They is also one other factor that works quite well to make a website retain pagerank make sure every page of your website that has links out also has multiple links to as many internal pages of your website.

Also a cunning trick that I have seen many website do that swap site wide links is to show a few links (sometimes a random selection) and then have a link to another page with the rest of the links on. This work very well not only to you limit the lose by having one link rather than a site wide one but you also only lose a fraction of the pervious PR anyway because this page link back to every page on your site.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 14th, 2005 at 4:48 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, SEO, Site Design. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.