28 replies to this topic

[yuccadude]

1) If a link on a page Leaks some PR value to other pages, could you use a Java link to exclude that link from leaking PR value?

2) If #1 above is true, could somebody show me an example?

[cbp]

Outgoing links do not leak PR. Period.

CBP

[daniel]

There is far too much emphasis placed on PageRank.

Don't worry about trying to 'trick' Google. Better spending that time and effort on securing some new links and writing more optimised content for the site. The benefit will be greater long-term.

In terms of leaking PageRank, links will not reduce the PageRank of a page - but the more links you have on a page, the PageRank 'donated' to the pages receiving the links will be decreased. Think of it as a cake. If you only have two links from a page (highly unlikely, but you get the idea), then each page being linked to will receive half of the cake (minus the dampening factor). You have 20 links, each page receives 1/20 of the cake, and so on. (You still keep another whole cake for yourself remember, as you don't actually lose any PageRank from your outgoing links).

However, like I said - don't worry about how the PageRank you have is being distributed. Concentrate on your content and obtaining more links to your page.

[Jill]

It would be a bad idea, a waste of time, and also not very fair to the site you were linking to.

Jill

[yuccadude]

I have several of my own pages, Privacy Policy, Contact information, Shipping, & Legal information. They appear on every page on my website.

All the pages leak PR to these pages and I don't see why these should receive anything PR wise.

I don't think that it will make that big a difference, but it might.

[mcanerin]

I once did somethng like that by using mini flash movies and putting the links into them.

It was a special case, and I haven't needed to do it since, but it seemed to work.

I wonder if your problem mght be solved simply by using robots.txt to prevent the spidering of those pages? I don't know, but if someone does know or has experience in this I'd like to hear from them myself.

Ian

[awall19]

I do not think it hurts the page with the links on it to link to other pages. The only possible damage is if you link to a ton of external sites without developing a strong site structure you may have lower ranking inner pages.

Most sites typically are developed enough internally (if you just link logically) to where linking out to other sites does not hurt. Look at the pagerank Yahoo has, and it was a directory linking to over a million sites!

[Jill]

Yes, i would choose the robots.txt solution. That's what we do for the forum for pages we don't need to waste the robots' time with.

Jill

[yuccadude]

While the robots.txt file will tell the spiders not to index this page or that, this is not the entire goal.

If I have a page PR5 with 15 links on it (4 to non essential pages as described in an earlier post) Then will will give 1/15th of its value to those pages that it links to (minus the dampening factor)

I want to reduce that to 11 visible (to the spiders) links so that it will pass on 1/11th of its value instead of a lesser about of 1/15th.

Once I find out how to "Spider Hide" these links, it will take me 10 minutes to do this.

I'm not spending a whole lot of time on this as I know that content is still basicall king, but every little bit helps!

[cbp]

Yuccadude

Did you actually read the early responses to this thread from me & Daniel? - there is no such thing as PR leakage/loss from outgoing links.

Also - I think its extremely unethical to request links from other sites, but then prevent links on your site from passing on PR by whatever means (ie robot.txt or java).

If I had a competitor that did that and I was having a really bad day, it would really make me feel better to email all there link partners to point this out

CBP

[Scottie]

Hi yuccadude-

I don't think obscuring the links within your own site that you don't want to rank for is neccessarily a bad idea. But remember, each of those pages has a "vote" as well and you are eliminating their vote by hiding them from the search engines.

I think ultimately, I'd rather optimize those pages! Especially the contact info page... and I just worked on a site that was getting great traffic through their shipping info page as well. I think you are overlooking opportunities (and content) by hiding those pages.

[yuccadude]

CBP:

I did read your post. I have since re-adjusted my verbage to say that one page will give value to the other via at least their PR / the # of outgoing links.

The links are less valuable to the page they link to the more outgoing links they have on the page.

So yes I agree that there may be no "Leakage" as you would suggested/interpreted the use of the word to mean that the page that has the PR and the links will be losing rank.

But I must respectfully disagree if the "Leakage" was to mean that the page with the link(s) "Leaks" or gives value to the page where it linked to as a percentage of it PR value/ # of outgoing leaks and some other factors (like the "Dampening" factor). So the word "Leak" or leakage was not a good word to use so I changed my tune to say it "Gives Value".

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Now back to my question: I'm just looking for the Java Syntax that would hide these links from the Spiders that count the outgoing links a page has.

Scottie: I can agree with you too, that it may help, but I have a ton of diverse products and I'm trying to hone (just a tad) their revelance. A link from a page about Blue Widget Contacts won't help me much if I'm a page about Pink Thingamabogs. Remember that EVERY page is linking to these contact/legal/privacy(CLP) pages but the CLP pages don't link to all the other pages. I just want to conserve my PR sharing between the pages that really count.

If I knew the syntax, then I could do some testing and then decide if this is the way to go from here. I was just hoping for a quick answer. (although this is turning out to be a good learning thread as was another post I did....WOW)

[yuccadude]

CPB

[quote]Also - I think its extremely unethical to request links from other sites, but then prevent links on your site from passing on PR by whatever means (ie robot.txt or java).[/quote]

I do too, but I'm not trying to prevent those links from passing on PR. I'm trying to stop PR from ALL of my pages to leak (ahem...) pass on PR to my Contact/ Privacy Policy/ Shipping/ Info pages.

[projectphp]

<a href="#" onclick="java script:location.href'INSERTURLHERE'">TEXTHERE</a>

I think you are wasting you time as well... But good luck!!! SEO Chat has several articles on this.

Good luck!!!!

[bobsledbob]

I used to think that the notion of 'leaked page rank' didn't make any sense at all. However, after reading the following paper, I really don't know which side of the fence I sit on.

This guy's paper is well researched and thought out, but it is only based on the Google founders' (Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page) original paper that they presented for their graduate work at Stanford.

No question the Google algorithm has changed since then, but none-the-less, the basic math with which pagerank is defined, by its very nature, leads to a system where pagerank is indeed leaked from one page to another. It's just the way the math works.

A careful read of this document reveals quite a few insights and frankly very much supports the views expressed by Jill and the various contributors to this forum in many ways. I think it's quite cool when the math can prove what we already have learned emperically.

Anyway, I don't give this paper too much consideration. It's an interesting read and worth knowing about. I do strongly agree that the best strategy is not to be worrying about pagerank (or any other search engine algorithm fad of the day), because you know that this will always be a moving target.

"http://www.iprcom.co...pers/pagerank/"

(apologies if this paper has already been linked to before. I didn't do a search for it on the forum before posting.)

Edited by Jill, 22 October 2003 - 11:03 PM.