Internal Linking

Make the most of your PageRank with internal linking.

It is not necessary for most sites to get every page to #1 in the search engines, it is important to get at least one page ranking well.

This can be achieved by internal linking. Each page on your site will inherently have some rank all be it very little, even without external links your pages are still awarded some rank. This means your pages can pass on rank. While it is not certain how much rank is awarded each page for our workings here it is irrelevant, for our workings we will use the figure of 1 for each page.

Now imagine you have 3 pages, that means your website has rank of 3, to increase your rank, you can double your pages to 6, now your site has page rank of 6. Wow, this is easy, just add more pages and you increase your rank, well not quite, while you may now have a rank of 6, you have to divide the rank between 6 pages, so in fact you still have a page rank of 1 per page no matter how many pages you have.

Now lets say you have 3 pages again, each page links each other page, each page will pass some page rank to each other, and pass it back, in the end you will be back to where you started from, 1 per page.

Now let’s try a different linking pattern, you will see that we have linked to Page B and C, but we don’t link between B and C. What we have done here is increased the PageRank of Page A at the expense of Page B and C.

How did we do this?

Google once released their calculations from these we have an idea how Google and others assign PageRank, the formula has been changed many times since but tests have shown that the main premise of the formula still hold true. Each page starts with PR 1 when it links it passes 0.85 though its links to the linked-to pages, each link getting a split while keeping 0.15. So A has passed 0.85/2 each to B and C, in return B and C have passed 0.85% of their PR back, seeing that they were given 0.425 each, they in fact passed 1.21 back to A. now A has received 1.21 from B and 1.21 from C plus the 0.15 it kept, it now has 2.57.

But since A has changed, we need to recalculate how much it passes to B and C again, in fact we need to keep recalculating each time a page changes so that the page that depend on it can be recalculated, this is infinite, but in reality it does not change much after about a number of iterations. After a number of iterations Page A would in fact have about 1.3 page rank. Now this is with only 3 pages imagine if you have 100 or 1,000 pages wheat you could do, but this is all really complicated, and there are other rules too.

Every page must be in the search engines index to be included in the calculations; each page must have a link in and a link out.

OK no more maths; just tell me what to do.

The simple answer is to link to every page from your home page, and link back to your home page from every child page. This would make your home page rank well. If you wanted to have 3 pages rank well, link to every page from your home page, and link only to you home page and the other pages you want to rank well from all child pages. This is not always possible, as you may need to create other links so that your uses can navigate, you may find it hard to link to every page from your home page, but the closer you get to this pattern the better you will do.

Incoming links and outgoing links

An incoming link will inject more rank into the calculations and can greatly increase the numbers, but each link leaving the site will decrease the rank. You should try to get incoming links directly to the pages you want to rank. And you should try to link out from pages with little page rank, so that you don’t leak as much link juice, even better lets say you have 100 links on the same page, 99 internal links and one outgoing link, you would be only leaking 1/100 of the pages rank, the rest would go elsewhere in your site.

This article is quite simplistic. There is a more recent tutorial on PageRank that may be more imformative.