Internal link structure

MaxB · 10-21-2003, 08:49 AM

Hi all.

If page A links to page B with 3 links (top nav, bottom nav, and in text), does page B gets 3 "votes" and page A counts 3 outbound links, or the number to the outbound links to the same target is irrelevant for both A and B pages?

Thanks

John Scott · 10-21-2003, 08:55 AM

MaxB,

Welcome to the forum.

That is a good question, and to be frank, I have no idea. I would think that it is possible, even likely maybe, that the three links would be casting three votes for the linked page. But I'm not sure.

I do believe each of the three links' anchor text would count.

MaxB · 10-21-2003, 09:05 AM

John,
thanks for your reply.

So if my goal was to keep as much PR as I could to the A page but wanted the B page to be crawled, do you think my best bet would be to leave one "spiderable" link to page B and mask (with JS..) the other two?

PhilC · 10-21-2003, 09:09 AM

It's a question that is addressed in my PageRank article (see my sig line), but the answer is that it isn't known. I prefer to assume that a page can only vote for another page once - otherwise PageRank would be too easy to manipluate. Also, casting multiple votes would be contrary to the PageRank concept.

A similar question is, can a page vote for itself? For the same reasons, I prefer to to assume that it can't.

John Scott · 10-21-2003, 09:09 AM

Yes, it sounds like the best way of doing it.

PhilC might know a bit more about the details of PageRank transfer - he's quite the expert in that area.

PhilC · 10-21-2003, 09:23 AM

All we can do is assume things. The pagerank concept is that page A votes for page B and, therefore, page B must be important. Casting 100 votes for page B by including 100 links to it doesn't make any difference because each vote is only worth 1/100 of what a single vote would be worth, but casting 100 votes for page B and 1 vote each for pages C and D seems to be contrary to the concept, and a much too easy way of manipulating PageRank - IMO.

MaxB · 10-21-2003, 09:39 AM

I agree.

BTW, talking about internal links, is it better, for SEO purposes, to use absolute or relative urls to link internal pages between them? Does it make any difference?

PhilC · 10-21-2003, 09:44 AM

It doesn't make any difference UNLESS you have links coming into the site that use different variations of the domain (www.domain.com and domain.com).

Both of those are different websites and se spiders will treat them as such. So if you have nn links coming into www.domain.com, and the internal links are relative, then se spiders will crawl the pages as being relative to www.domain.com. But if you have one or two links coming into domain.com, and the internal links are relative, the internal pages will be crawled as being relative to domain.com. The result is that the PageRank that the domain.com IBLs should have brought into the site is spread between the pages on a different site - domain.com.

Did I write that in an understandable way?

MaxB · 10-21-2003, 09:51 AM

Absolutely.
Thanks!