Apr 11th, 2007
Keep your web pages PR by eliminating weak outgoing links
I bet you want to improve your website position in the search results on major search engines, primly on Google. Being seen in the organic search results is the good way to receive the stable targeted traffic almost for free. That’s why you have to continuously improve the Page Rank (PR) of your pages. Everyone knows that good PR “comes” through incoming links from other websites with high PR. In the same time, not everyone knows that external links on our websites steal our PR and pass it to those third party website.
To keep your website PR you should minimize the number of outgoing links, especially if you’re linking to sites with poor PR (many SEO experts believe that outgoing links to relevant websites with high PR positively affect your own PR). How this can be done:
Remove weak links
If there are unnecessary outgoing links on your website then simply remove them. Period.
Use rel=”nofollow” attribute within anchor tag
If you cannot delete an external link by some reasons then you may use “nofollow” attribute within A tag. The “nofollow” attribute that can be associated with links was originated as an idea by Google and pitched past MSN and Yahoo, as well as major blogging vendors, gaining support. When added to any link, it will serve as a flag that the link has not been explicitly approved by the site owner.
The link that looks like
<a href=”http://www.site.com/page.html” rel=”nofollow”>Cool Page</a>
won’t grab your PR and won’t improve PR of the linked page.
Convert external links into internal ones
Another approach is replacing direct links with redirects.
For instance, replace
<a href=”http://www.site.com/page.html”>Cool Page</a>
with
<a href=”/redirect.php?s=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.site.com%2Fpage.html”>Cool Page</a>
SEO gurus believe that search engine spiders can pass through 301 and 302 redirects. So, redirect.php script must be slightly tricky. Here is a simple example of redirect.php script:
<html><body>
<script language=”javascript”>
document.write(’<form id=”go” method=”get” action=”<?=$s?>” style=”display:none”></form>’);
function bl()
{ document.getElementById(’go’).submit(); }
bl();
</script>
</body></html>
This script will pass a real visitor through but will stop a crawler. Thus the search engine spider will count the link as internal one.
Revamp your website by using these simple techniques and don’t let other websites steal your PR.
I think this is somewhat unethical. If you want to link to another site because it’s interesting, they deserve the PR credit. nofollow is okay for comments etc. to prevent spam, but don’t use it to destroy the whole concept of Page Rank.
Matt,
It’s just a technique. It depends on you how you will apply it.
Sometimes there are situations when you have to put the link to another site by some technical reasons (e.g. web counter, mail-list subscription server, search engine, etc) and I think it’s quite ethical to “protect” such technical link.
If you review a site, if you respect it and value its content than you’d better to give it a credit.
So, it depends …
I think you’d be better off removing links for the “Don’t Make Me Think” principal.
If it isn’t necessary for the customer to do, then don’t give them the option.
If your pushing for a sale, don’t let them visit another site. If you want them to signup, then remove extra links.
And don’t worry so much about the PR.