Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Linking tips to improve Google page rank.

There are several things you can do with linking structure on you website to improve Google page rank (PR).

First in your navigation bars don’t use relative links. But instead always use an absolute link.
What do we mean here. Well a relative link is like this /nameofpage.html, while an absolute link would be: http://www.domainname.com/nameofpage.html.

Another thing you want to be aware of is using http://domainname.com versus http://www.domainname.com

You want to be consistent and use only one or the other preferably the www. Version.
Here’s why from a Google PR perspective. Google in effect sees them as two different pages. So when you link to both of them you are splitting you links and PR thus potentially lowering your PR for each one. You want to concentrate all your links (both internal and external) all on one version, preferably on the www. Version

Another way to improve page rank is not sending it away. This involves analyzing what we are linking to. This especially applies to external sites that we have no reason to want to boost their PR.

What we are talking about here is using the nofollow link. The syntax is a rel="“nofollow”" href="http://www.sappsays.com/">http://www.sappsays.com//a or a href="http://www.sappsays.com/" rel="“nofollow”">http://www.sappsays.com//a . Both will work.

It’s like a normal link except you add the rel=“nofollow”

The following page goes into more detail.

http://www.googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html


So when linking off site when would you want to or not want to use nofollow

Examples of wanting to use nofollow:

You have a shipping page on your site and you’re linking to UPS for more info.
You’re linking to a shopping cart.

Examples of when you don’t want to use nofollow:

When you’re trading links with someone

To sum it up, using nofollow doesn’t transfer any PR or link credits, otherwise a link does transfer some PR and a link credit.

Click here for other Search Engine (SEO) articles and tips.

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