SEO Tip: Put Important Pages Close to Your Homepage
Matt Cutts of Google recently came out with a video explaining the wrong and right ways to “sculpt” PageRank. At the end of the video he confirms that keeping important web pages close to your homepage is a good way to help your rankings. Read on to learn about the details.
A quick refresher on PageRank
Google operates as a big democracy, where links count as votes. But all votes are not counted equally, and some votes aren’t counted at all. Google has an algorithm called PageRank (named after Larry Page) for calculating how many votes a web page has and how important those votes are. A link from a high PageRank page counts more than a link from a low PageRank page.
One way to think of how PageRank operates is as “juice” flowing through a network of pipes. Every time a website links to your website, it’s sending “link juice” into your website, which then flows throughout your website. The higher the PageRank of the page containing the link, the more juice the link will pass.
Links are the “pipes” through which the link juice passes. Web pages that have accumulated large pools of PageRank may rank better in Google.
Sculpting PageRank
Once it became known that PageRank flows around your website, and pages that accumulate the most “juice” may have a ranking advantage, it wasn’t long before people started trying to manipulate the flow of PageRank so that it would flow to pages they most wanted to rank well for.
A common tactic for doing this was to use the “no follow” attribute on internal links to unimportant pages. Adding the “no follow” attribute to a link tells Google not to pass “juice” to a link (it closes off the pipe, so to speak). People figured that if they no followed unimportant pages they’d never want to rank well for, like a privacy policy page or a contact page, then more juice would be left over to go to important pages. This was called “link sculpting.”
Why link sculpting with “no follow” stopped working
At some point Google changed the way “no follow” worked such that it no longer made sense to do it on internal links for link sculpting.
Here’s how no follow used to work:
You have a page with 10 internal links (links that go to other pages on your website) and 100 points of link juice to spread around. In that case each of the 10 links would get 10 points worth of link juice. If you “no followed” 5 links, then the remaining links would get 20 points worth of link juice each. The link juice is simply concentrated into fewer links, making them better off.
Here’s how no follow works now:
You have a page with 10 internal links and 100 points of link juice to spread around. If you “no followed” 5 links, then the remaining links would still get 10 points worth of link juice each, and the 50 points of link juice going to the 5 “no followed” links would simply evaporate. You haven’t gained anything by using “no follow” to control the flow of PageRank.
This change was a bit of a scandal in the SEO industry because it turned out a lot of firms had been recommending that clients sculpt PageRank with “no follow” after Google revealed it had stopped working, proving that the practice was boondoggle.
Okay so what can you do now?
Most websites tend to attract most of their links to the homepage. It’s just the way it is. What this means is that most websites have a big pools of link juice bottlenecked at their homepages.
When you consider that the more times links juice passes through links, the more it “thins,” you realize that by putting an important page 3 links away from your homepage, the juice that finally arrives at that page is less than if you had put the important page 1 link away from the homepage.
So, for example, if you’ve got 10 practice areas listed on your website, but DUI is really important to your business, link directly to it from your homepage. The optimal way to do it, at least from a PageRank perspective, would be homepage > DUI, rather than homepage > practice areas > criminal defense > DUI.
That said, you can’t be myopic about sculpting PageRank, since it only tries to redirect the juice you already have. In practical terms, what you probably need to rank better is to attract more link juice, not to play with the juice you already have. But we do have confirmation straight from Google that putting pages close the homepage can give them a PageRank boost.
