blog.webmastersdesk.com » Site Design

Outgoing links; do they reduce you PR?

Administrator — Sat, 31 Dec 2005 12:26:51 +0000

I managed to get caught up in a thread on a forum about if outgoing links reduce the amount of Page Rank on your site. The discussion went on for ages going around in circles the main advocate was chrishirst, who refused to backdown and also refused to back up his own points. He totally believed that:

NO NO NO NO NO! The calculation is for incoming links to page A. the outgoing links on page A are not factored into the calculations so they cannot have even the slightest effect on the value.

If you read the thread here, you can see what I'm talking about. The conversation is bizarre, even though I had all cited all my evidence he still refused to admit that their may be a outside chance he hadn't understood the equation.

The debate was completely ground to a halt because; He could not get his head around how if the equation was based on incoming links how the outgoing links could reduce the amount of Page Rank you have.

We beat around the bush for a long time, I tried to exaplin the way the equation worked.

NO I understand that you need to agree on these points on how google's page rank calulation works:

The green bar shown on the toolbar is just a label given to a page depending on the group that the actual page rank falls into.
The calculation is done for each individual page not site.
Each time the calculation is done it is done from scratch; no prior Page rank is worked in the equation.
The equation is repeated multiple times.

This is how I like to think of the calulation. Bear in mind this is a simplification (and if you want to go into specific details it is wrong).

Each page indexed by google is given a value of one; part of this value is given as a vote which is divided between all of the pages that it links to. So a new value is calulated. Now this is the part that most people understand, Pagerank is calulated from incoming links.

This is where it gets tricky, the equation is repeated a least 40 times, so the pervious pagerank that has been gain on pervious calulation can be passed on. This process is repeated multiple times. So since you divide your vote between the pages that you link to, if you link to pages that are voting for you then in the next calculation (vote) you are going to get more back than if you have linked elsewhere.

And this is the main point if you link out of your site, to a website that does not link back to you. The page rank is not coming back to your site so you are going to drain/lose/leak PR.

Does page rank have any effect on how well your site is ranked? That is a much more complicated question.

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And this is me signing off!!

Website accessibility and the law.

Administrator — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 14:20:17 +0000

The law now says that the all websites in Europe shoudl be accessible to all disabled people, so that you don't fall foul of the Disability Discrimination Act. You can find out more about the Disability Discrimination Act.

This is what I was sent through email.

"It only takes one complaint to the Disability Rights Commission about your website for them to start an investigation, and if they decide to proceed with legal action, you could face a huge cost not only in compensation, but also for your companyï¿½s credibility."

- Anne-Laure Dupuis

Only a few website realistically need to worry about these changes in legislation. Only really large website need worry about this. Their are only a couple of orginsation that would bother to sue over this, and I doubt they woudl sue my little websites.

I'm not saying that Anne-Laure Dupuis is a fraud, the service you could provide is ligitimate (even though both of here website don't compile). However it is scare-mongering, pure and simple.

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And it goodbye from me and goodbye from er me.

Recent search engine conference

Administrator — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 09:35:01 +0000

In a recent SE conference, Matt Cutts from Google, Kaushal Kurapti from Ask Jeeves , and Tim Mayer from Yahoo talked about how their 3 engines use links to determine the order of the listings of their search results.

So what did they say?

Seems, the standard principle continue to apply: say a links to b then a is voting for b . The more links the better nad your ranking will show this.

The Ask Jeeves advised to avoid cloaking pages, link farms and invisible or hidden links. He decided to empthasis how text links can be understood by search engines but image links could not. I looks like white hat search engine optimization is still important.

The Yahoo respesentive seem to suggest they would move to some kind of social community aspect (not sure what this might mean maybe a emphasis on the didrectory). He also said that the links to your web site should look natural.

Google's representative agreed suggested to add one new page of content everyday and that the links to your site should not all have the same text. He confirmed Google only returns a couple of the backlinks they have indexed.

SEOpartners: Webmasterdesk new SEO project.

Administrator — Wed, 18 May 2005 15:15:53 +0000

Webmastersdesk is launching a new SEO project for a limited amount of good quality php website.

The project offers:
A Massive natural link building campaign.
A free monthly reporting service trafic and SE reporting service.

Please go here for futher details

Link Exchange Programme Comparision

Administrator — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 16:58:22 +0000

Okay I have been doing a comparison of the link swapping programmes that are available. These are the ones I am looking at:

www.gotlinks.com
www.linksmanager.com
www.linkdash.com
www.powerlinks.com

Price (monthly):
Free www.gotlinks.com
$20 www.linksmanager.com
Free (or $9.95) www.linkdash.com
$9.95 www.powerlinks.com

Level of automation

Danger of upseting the search engines.

Reducing Page Rank leaking

Administrator — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 20:48:38 +0000

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.