ezSEO Newlsetter #245
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June 21, 2009 by Andy
In light of the fact that Google have dropped a bombshell on webmasters, I have decided to devote this issue of the newsletter to discussing Page Rank, sculpting and the nofollow tag, and how the rules appear to have changed.
Squandering Page Rank with “Nofollow”
Ever since Michael Campbell released the Revenge of the Mininets and its companion guide on Dynamic Linking, Page Rank sculpting has grown in popularity as a technique for improving rankings. Before I go into any detail on what Page Rank Sculpting is, and how the goal posts have been moved, let me just make sure we are all on the same page.
One of the ways that Page Rank has been described is the probability that a random surfer can find a page in the Google index simply by clicking on links. Let’s take an example.
If the Google index had 1000 pages, and each of these 1000 pages had a single link pointing to it from another page, what would be the probability that a surfer would find any particular page?
Well, there would be 1000 links available to click on, but you can only click on one. Therefore each page has a probability of 1/1000 that they would be found by a random click.
If each of those pages were one page mini-sites, then each site would have a Page Rank of 1/1000.
Let’s take this one step further and assume that 990 of those pages were 1 page minisites, but the other 10 pages all belonged to a single site.
So let me ask you the question again. If all of the pages in the index had a single link pointing to them, what is the probability that a random surfer would end up on one of the 990 minisites? How about landing on a specific pages on the 10 page site? Well, with single links pointing to each of the 1000 pages, the chances of the random surfer landing on any particular page is still 1/1000.
However, what has changed is that the probability of the surfer landing on a page belonging to the 10 page site. That is now 10 times more likely, or a probability of 10/1000 = 1 / 100 (since 10 of those 1000 pages in the index belong to that site).
Thinking about this in terms of Page Rank, what this means is that each of the 990 minisites have a total Page Rank of 1/1000. The 10 page site, however, has a total Pagerank of 1/100 (even though each of its individual pages still only have a PR of 1/1000).
Clearly then, one of the ways to increase the Page Rank of a site is to increase the number of pages.
OK, back to the initial idea that Page Rank is the probability of a random surfer landing on a page by clicking links. Let’s take it to an extreme. What would the Page Rank of a single page be, if all 999 other pages linked to it (and it linked to itself)?
Well, since every link leads to that page, the probability would be 1000/1000 = 1. That means the surfer would find it every time.
The idea of Page Rank sculpting is that by increasing the links to important pages on a site, and limiting links to less important pages, you can increase the Page Rank of those important pages, and therefore its ranking ability.
Pages create Page Rank, but links can move it around.
Each of the pages on that 10 page site have some page rank (1/1000 in our example above), but if 9 of the pages were to link to a single page on the site, that single page would be increasing its chances of being found by the random surfer. That single important page would then be 9 times more likely to get found, so its Page Rank has increased.
If we are assuming that each of the 1000 pages in the Google index only have one link each (just to keep this simple), do you see how the Page Rank of 9 of the 1000 pages will have decreased as links on the 10 page site were redirected to its own internal page?
Page Rank sculpting is all about controlling where Page Rank is moved to.
Page Rank Sculpting with the No Follow Tag
A few years ago, Google told us that it was going to support the nofollow tag. When the nofollow tag was used in a link, we were effectively telling Google that we did not consider the page in the link trustworthy, or important. Google told us that they would not send any Page Rank to those pages, which meant SEOs could start sculpting Page Rank.
Here is the way it would work (this is a very simplified model):
With the introduction of NoFollow, we were told that PR would not be passed through nofollow links, which meant more could be passed to pages we felt were more important:
Do you see how by adding nofollow to 3 of the pages, the other two get the full share of the 100 points available?
Well that is how it was supposed to work, and did. Apparently, Matt Cutts of Google has now said that this no longer works, and what we actually get now is this:
With this new model, any nofollow links do not pass the Page Rank onto the pages, but rather than being conserved for the DO FOLLOW links on the page, that Page Rank is lost.
So where does that leave us?
Well, actually in terms of losing PR, we are in the same situation we were in before Google adopted the nofollow tag. If you have a link on your site that goes off-site, you will lose those PR points whether you nofollow the link or not. However, not everything has changed. No follow still has one very good use – to tell Google that you do not “recommend” or “vote” for the page you are linking to.
When you are building a site, you quite often want to link to another site. However, linking out can be a dangerous game if you are not careful. Google has made it clear that if you link to bad neighborhoods, you are likely to be tarred with the same brush.
A good example is with comments on your blog. If you approve a comment, and have your site setup to FOLLOW those links, you are in effect telling Google that you vouch for the quality of those sites linked to by the people leaving comments. If Google find out you are “lying”, you may find your site being penalized. This is one of the very good reasons to leave the default setting of nofollow alone in your blog comment section.
What are the implications of leaving the nofollow for comments?
Well, consider this diagram:
Out of the 100 Page Rank points your page has to distribute, only 20 of them are being reinvested in your site. The other 80 are lost.
What if comments were changed to DO FOLLOW:
Well, in this case your page is still reinvesting only 20 Page Rank Points back into your site. The big difference now though is that you are also telling Google that you vouch for the quality of the 4 pages linked to from the comments. While you may keep the same Page Rank points on your site, you are now also adding to your work-load by giving yourself a bunch of pages that you would need to check on a weekly or monthly basis for quality. This clearly would become unmanageable, so you would have to just assume that those that left comments did not significantly change the focus or quality on their sites (or sell there sites, or let registration expire).
If like me you are leaning heavily towards the nofollow tag for comments, what can you do to keep more of the Page Rank points on your own site, rather than flushing them down the toilet? Well, there are a couple of things you could do:
By increasing the number of links on a page to other pages on your site, you are effectively holding on to more of the Page Rank. In the first example showing comments NO FOLLOWED, the page reinvested 20 Page Rank points back into the site (80 were lost). By increasing the number of internal links on the page to 10, that page is now reinvesting 71 of the 100 page rank points back in to the site (29 are lost).
The other thing you could do is decrease the number of comments allowed on a page. This is not so difficult – just approve the really useful ones, and be a little more picky about what you authorize.
Of course, the easiest strategy would be to do both. Increase the number of internal links, while reducing the number of comments:
Google have really opened a can of worms with the announcement that Page Rank Sculpting no longer works (and not everyone agrees with that – see Leslie Rohde article below).
I would hope that with blogging being such an huge part of the World Wide Web, Google will take a good hard look at the implications of follow/no follow in comment sections (and the idea that a do follow link essentially means that the blogger is vouching for that page), and just decide to discount links from blog comment sections (if they don’t already do this).
Ignoring comment sections on web pages, would help to reduce the massive amount of comment spam going on, as well as give legitimate webmasters a reason to reward those who take time to comment.
A similar issue arises with Privacy and Disclaimer pages. In my opinion, Google really should ignore the links to these pages as far as passing Page Rank is concerned.
Privacy and Disclaimer pages are generally linked to from every page on your site (that’s two links per page minimum – three if you have a contact page).
If you DO FOLLOW these links, these “unimportant” pages may be seen as the most important pages on the site due to the Page Rank points they accumulate from every single page on the site. Clearly this isn’t reasonable.
What if we take the generally accepted approach of nofollowing these links. What you then get is every single page on your site leaking Page Rank into the ether… Again, that is clearly not good news.
In a question, Matt Cutts was asked specifically about these pages, and he replied that it was best to leave them as do follow links. Is it possible Google already ignores these links w.r.t. Page Rank?
Assuming that Google count all links, including those to Disclaimer and Privacy pages, you have the choice:
1. Make the Disclaimer and Privacy two of the most important pages on your site in terms of Page Rank, or
2. Nofollowing the links, and leaking Page Rank on every page of your site that links to them.
This last week I have been thinking of ways to combat the PR leakage to privacy and disclaimer pages, but before I show you one of the ideas I had for this, let me just say one thing.
This PR leakage is not something I am going to worry about.
As the old saying goes – “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, and my sites seem to be doing fine. I think I’ll wait for the dust to settle before making any changes to my sites.
OK, here is one idea to reduce PR leakage from disclaimer and privacy pages. First, the way we currently link to these pages:
Each of the circles represents a page linking to each of the 3 pages. All of the arrows represent wasted Page Rank (either you pass the Page Rank to these pages, or lose the Page Rank from your site if what Google says is true – the choice is yours).
OK, here is one way you could reduce the Page Rank costs involved.
Instead of linking to three separate pages (contact, privacy and disclaimer), create a single link on each page that looks like this:
Privacy | Disclaimer | Contact
That link points to what I’ll call the main “legal” page.
The legal page will be a page with links to the Privacy, disclaimer and Contact pages above the fold. Below the fold, list all of the important pages on your site.
If you list 97 important pages, then there will be 100 links on the legal page. The disclaimer, privacy and contact page will each get 1/100 of the available page rank points, with the other 97 being divided between your important site pages.
Here is it as a diagram:
Firstly, notice that there is three times less Page Rank being passed to the main “legal page” because each page on the site would have one link pointing to this page.
The Page Rank cost will be dramatically reduced as you add more links to important pages.
I am sure that some people will say that this is not acceptable because a privacy link should go to the privacy page and not some intermediary page, and I am not sure if there are any legal implications of doing it this way, so I take no responsibility if you try this. Maybe you have other ideas? Feel free to comment on any of this article in the comments section at the end of this page.
Further Reading on the Nofollow / Page Rank Sculpting debate:
Page Rank Sculpting by Matt Cutts (June 15th 2009)
Operation BENDOVER by Dan Thies (June 11th 2009)
The Maths behind PR Sculpting by Leslie Rohde
PageRank Sculpting Isn’t Dead But Comments Can Kill Your PageRank by Andy Beard
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Very interesting article Andy, thanks.
I suspect that the links to Privacy and Disclaimer pages are already discounted by Google – on the basis that if not, surely we’d be seeing far more of them cropping up in the natural search results.
Regards,
Martin
I would hope Google do, but don’t forget that the those pages will only appear in searches related to the link text and content of the pages (pages are ranked, not sites).
Taking the example of a privacy page, these would turn up in searches for “privacy”, and not for the site’s niche-related phrases.
Do a search of privacy, and Google returns something like 1,625 million results. Google is certainly applying ranking factors to these pages…
I have these pages nofollwed on my sites, so I cannot check whether the Page Rank of a privacy page is higher than it should be based on inbound links from the site pages. It might be interesting to check a few sites that are not using nofollow.
Hi Andy,
my solution was to have a “site map” link off my home page where the site map contains links to all the pages and hence the legal pages can be found by the few people that want to navigate to them, and these pages should hopefully get picked up by search engines for indexing without wasting PR distribution.
I guess if you really want to link to the legal pages from each page on your site you could maybe use some kind of widget that may get ignored by the search engine such as a Java applet.
Andrew & K
I think that from a legal perspective it is important to have links to these pages on all pages of a site. Also I think (not sure) that Directories like Yahoo may require it.
I think I need to read that again! Thanks for the explanation Andy…how about a nice plugin that will do all this for us?
On my wish list…
Alex
Alex, you can use server side includes SSI on regular web pages and I think on blog php pages if done correctly. On a blog you can use the or the type of commands to include links to pages for your privacy, tos and other legal stuff pages. The require command will stop the execution if there are syntax errors or other php programming problems with the pages or command. (Suggest the w3c php school on php programming. http://www.w3schools.com/PHP/DEfaULT.asP or general tab for all schools || http://www.w3schools.com/)
If you are blogging, there is a nifty plugin called included it available to assist with including about anything in a blog post or page. (thanks Andy for letting us know about it.)
The commands are the include include_once require or require_once that did not get picked up in my previous comment
Hi Andy,
This is an interesting article and I like your simple and intelligent solution to minimizing PR leakage to privacy, contact and disclaimer pages. Makes sense to me.
Also Leslie’s matter of fact approach to things is always refreshing. I have been a Rohde fan since the Revenge of the Mini Net. I actually implemented it in a six page websites for buying real estate. He made a believer out of me, when what he suggested personally worked for me.
Since then I have met him several times at Stomper Net events and he still shines in terms of making the difficult simple to understand. When he says things like:
“About anchor text, just remember that all the “blue shit” matters.”
You and he are two of favorite seo guys, long term.
Thanks for presenting this discussion. It really makes me think.
Thumbs up.
Michael
Put the Disclaimer, Privacy, and Contact only on the home page?
Keep us posted Andy. I value your opinion and analysis and ability to express them in normal language. Your writings and courses have benefited me significantly (HTML to Wordpress and Wordpress for Affiliate Sites – I highly recommend both). Your SEONEWS (a solid PR4) is something I always take time to read. There are many SEO “gurus” (with no PR on their websites)- I just hit delete to their emails. I don’t have time to read them all, I focus on what works, your stuff. Thanks for all the free advice – that’s why I buy most of your stuff – it works!
Hi Andy, thanks as always for your time to explain things such as this – diagrams and all!
So going back to a basic question if I may, when you say –
“Clearly then, one of the ways to increase the page rank of a site, is to increase the number of pages.”
So would you think if anybody wants to create sites with just one sales page promoting a product, that either – they may be wasting their time, and/or this one page site may have a very short shelf-life, as no other content/pages will be ever added?
I guess what I’m trying to ask, is if a person really can be successful creating one page sites as their primary business model. (I realize you prefer the authority site model, which I also like), however I’d like to also try the ‘one page model’, but don’t want to do it, if it will be futile and a waste of time.
Thank you for listening
Mark
Mark
Regarding one page sites. Adding new pages to a site will increase the overall Page Rank of the site, but an easier way is to get links in from other sites.
Adding a page to a site will increase the overall page rank of the site by a very tiny amount, whereas a single PR3 or 4 link pointing to a page on your site could give it a massive boost. Clearly then a one page site can work.
Andy,
What if you named the single page “Legal and Contact Info”.
Then, at the top of that page, right after the title, I would have a short introductory paragraph that would say something like:
This page contains the following information:
1) Privacy Policy
2) Terms of Use
3) Contact Information
Then, provide that info in the order you described and use Section Headings for each of the three elements.
That way visitors would immediately know that all your legal and contact info is right here… on this page.
And you will have only created one more page on your site and you are only using one link to get to it.
Dave
Dave
You mean a single page linked from the main “legal” page as in my diagram? Sure, why not.
One more thing you could do is put links on your “legal” page to important pages on your site. Under all the legal jibber jabber you could say something like “now that all of that is out of the way, feel free to look around. Here are some of our best articles: *list of 10 articles here*”
Alternatively, you could make ads to your other web sites.
This way all the PR that “leaks” to this page can further leak to pages you actually want to rank. If authority is a problem, find creative ways to link the two (IE, on a medical web site, “contact” could refer to “disease transmission on contact”, privacy to an article on patient privacy rights, about is a generic word that can be stuffed just about anywhere; if there’s no way to monetize those pages it’s OK, you can still link them to money making articles)
I suspect the second paragraph after the “Privacy | Disclaimer | Contact” line should have “fold” in the two places it has “folder.”
Why not just go ahead and put those three sets of content on the single “legal” page and then the important links below those sets of content as a sort of site map to important stuff?
Lane
Thanks for pointing out the type. Strange I did it twice unless the grammar checker changed it. I have fixed it.
As for your comment, yes, someone else suggested that in one of the other comments. It might be a good idea using jump URLs, so that each link jumped down the page to the relevant section. My only concern would be if these documents were so long that the URLs were pushed too far down the page. I am a believer in getting the most important links as high up the content as possible. Of course, you could always include the important page list in a menu sidebar so that it appeared above the docuements in the HTML.
It really boils down to some simplicities:
1) Provide great content.
2) Make sure those who comment on your posts contribute to that great content.
You action steps would be to routinely delete comments which are spammy and non-sequitur or just there so someone will click on their link – meaning spammy “commment marketing”.
When someone provides a valuable contribution to your content, then they should be linked to.
Another option is to have a forum on another site which is where all the discussion takes place – and all the links go.
But even then, it’s content moderation which makes the forums valuable. I’ve seen more and more forums neglected and turned into spammer bait.
Moderate the comments you receive or get someone to do it for you. And use spam filters on everything.
But provide outstanding content (like Andy does) every single time.
Another thing you can do IF you have comments FOLLOWED, is to reply to each comment you approve. That way, for every outgoing link to someones site, you have a link in your reply as well.
Is Googlebot already in a position to read javascript?
I did my sculpting with JS they way described by M. Campbell years ago and it worked fine (at least i think so).
Structure was (is) that all internal links are going into a sitemap which accumulates and redistributes PR. Highly important pages are also linked to w/o JS. – Any ideas if this still helps?
I’m pretty sure that Google can get URLs from Javascript.
Are comment links automatically no follow on wordpress? Where do you change the settings – sorry, can’t find this info on my wordpress blog.
Jeanette
Jeanette
You can get a plugin for remove the nofollow from comments. Search Google for it.
With the uncertainty about how Google handles comment links, maybe Pavan Kumar (http://bit.ly/dEwk9) has the right idea when he suggests changing the theme code to make the links just plain text. What do you think?
Lane
Removing the links and having plain code is a nice idea.
Hi Andy
Tried to print off your newsletter (easier to read for me than on screen) but the diagrams are not being printed with the text. Any reason for that?
Joanna
Sorry Joanna, no idea why the images are not printing. Checked Print Preview in Firefox and they appear in the preview.
I may have solved the problem. Tried to copy @ paste your diagrams, no success either. Then I discovered that each of your diagrams has a link to its own page. You click on the link which takes you to the diagram page, and then you can print/copy that page. Maybe it’s best to leave out the links next time. Thanks
Sigh… It just seems like this has become such a numbers game between Google and webmasters who are in business to compete. The rest of us who just want to create a really good site with quality content for our viewers can so easily wind up left in the dust because we’re not jumping through the latest hoops. Thank you for explaining all this so well. It shows me what I’m missing out on while I’m busy creating a good quality site. Someone else mentioned that G might already be ignoring policy pages, and that seems to be the case with my site, since there is no PR for that page at all. I had assumed that links between pages of your own site didn’t count in PR. An example is one page that is linked to from every page on my site, at least once and usually twice or more, yet it currently has NO rank, although I think it used to. All this makes my head hurt. :-S I really appreciate you laying it all out with these great diagrams though.
I know what you mean, Jo, about the frustration of trying to keep up with the latest advice (although it is appreciated, Andy). My “good content” sites have never made much money for me, although I see now I need to do more promoting than I did in the past. But just good content won’t cut it. I made the most money for the longest time with garbage generated sites. In fact, I still have one ancient Traffic Equalizer site that’s bringing in a little bit each day. The only reason I don’t have more sites like that is that I’ve converted them to white hat sites that are not producing anything yet.
Hi Lane,
Thanks for your comments. Yes, I’ve often heard that it’s the “bad guys” who are making all the money. :-S I’m sorry to hear that you’ve had the same experience, where a really good content site has been far less successful financially. I guess I’m going to have to invest more time, effort and money in promotion. My website topic is my passion and there’s no way I’d give it up, although unfortunately it is rather time consuming to not be bringing in as much income as I’d like. I’m looking into some new monetizing ideas now, so hopefully that will change. I’ll have to play around with Andy’s ideas too. I’d never heard of PR sculpting — yet another learning curve!
“I’m pretty sure that Google can get URLs from Javascript.” yeah, and now they even follow links they find in submit forms.
Way back in 2004 they published the fact that they spider Javascript:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/googles-index-nearly-doubles.html
So there is nowhere to hide your pages on a website IMO. But page rank flow is another animal.
Thanks Andy (again, again) for explaining complicated matters. May I add that according to what I have been told or seen, ‘standard links’ on each page isn’t regarded as important by Google as the hypertext links in the text of an article etc. on an individual page. I have had plenty of menu links on my main stock photography site and my feeling is that they havn’t done any harm.
But on the other hand to add links to internal pages of my site from individual text sections should be a good addition, helpful for my visitors and accordingly (hopefully) valued by Google.
What do you go for?
Soren Breiting
Denmark
Soren
It may be true that standard navigation links have less of a benefit, but they certainly don’t hurt. GOogle actually likes a site that has clear text link based navigation menus, as it makes it easier for them to spider but more importantly easier for your visitors. Although a lot of people think SEO is all about “tricking” the search engines, a good rule of thumb is that anything that makes things easier for your visitors is generally a good SEO strategy.