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Inverted Page Rank - Testing Linking Hierarchy
The page ranks on my site have been “inverted” for quite a while and only just now have they begun to shift towards what’s more normal.
Inverted Page Rank? What’s an Inverted Page Rank?
A normal web site usually has page rank concentrated on the home page, followed by the main category pages, and finally the normal content pages. So your site may have a page rank of 4 on the home page, 3 on each of the category pages, and from 2 to 0 on content pages.
DiamondLime.com had (what I consider) a rare case of page rank distribution—it was almost totally inverted from the normal hierarchy in the paragraph above. The home page had a page rank of 2, category pages had a page rank of 3, articles had page ranks anywhere from 4 to 0, and the site map had a page rank of 5!
How Did My Page Rank Get Turned Upside Down?
I’m not entirely sure how my page rank got to be so strange, but here are a few of my theories:
- Heavy Deep Linking
My site has been linked to in an unordinary fashion—I have a few pages and blog posts that are far more popular and linked to than most of my main pages. More people link to my post on ChaCha, The BYU Blog and Web Site Directory, or The Lime Blog than the home page. All these links’ page rank is getting poured into my site further down in my navigation hierarchy.
- Page Rank Bleeding
One page that should have had a high page rank and didn’t was my blog. I think that this is because there were many links on my blog page to other sites that were bleeding page rank like mad.
- Links Per Page
The Lime Blog and the home page of DiamondLime.com both had many, many links to other pages, effectively distributing all of their page rank away from themselves.
How Can I Un-Invert Page Ranks?
I did a few things that have helped even my page rank out. To fix the deep linking that was turning my page rank upside down, I tried (within reason) to make sure those pages that were heavily linked to also linked to many other pages to spread their page rank around. I changed how my page rank bleeding happened by reducing the number of off-site links that were on main pages and shifting these links to a links page (I still want to link to my friends and to valuable resources, so I couldn’t just remove them. Moving these links helped make things more organized, too). Finally, I added a few links to emphasize pages that I wanted to give higher page rank to.
These efforts seem to have worked—instead of ranging from 0 to 5, my page ranks recently became 4 for all the main pages except the main page of my blog and 3 for most everything else. The lesson is that you can influence how your “Google Juice” or page rank is shared around, even if the bottle is upside down and making a sticky mess.
on January 28th, 2007 at 11:59 am
I personally think that the main reason for your inverted Page Ranks is the heavy deep linking, which IMO is actually a good think because those pages would be more likely to rank in search engines for the keywords they are relevant for which will bring in more targeted traffic than if you ranked for more general keyword for your homepage.
on January 29th, 2007 at 2:38 am
Chris,
I think that I agree with you—the main reason that my deeper pages had better page ranks is the heavy deep linking.
Another interesting thing to think about is whether or not you really want the deeper, specific pages to rank better. When you are first starting a site or blog or when you really need to make sure you are attracting the right people, deep-linking and more specific keywords are very, very important and desirable. When your page ranks start to get higher and you are after sheer traffic volume, trying to refocus on more general terms may become important.
I made the mistake of not really thinking about what it was I am truly after, and the truth is I think that I am after those specific keywords, especially since my blog is centered on some of the most competitive topics on the Internet and I’m not likely to get ranked well for terms like “internet marketing” in the near future. Luckily, I don’t think that I ruined my rankings with the changes I made.
Thanks for your comment!