I have previously talked about blog internal linking and how you can increase your search engine rankings by improving your internal linking structure. This article will focus on how to distribute your blog page authority flow to optimize the search engine rankings.
Image by: Lady-Bug
What is page authority?
Every page that has been indexed by the search engines receives a certain amount of authority. Search engines calculate the authority different one from another but in general the most important factor of getting blog page authority is to have good inbound links to your blog from other websites and blogs.
Page authority in Google is called PageRank. PR is calculated on an article by article basis rather than on a blog by blog basis. So your blog home page might have a PR5 ranking, while your most recent article might have PR0.
How does the link juice work?
Each page passes link juice (authority) and each linked page gets the authority. If your PR5 blog main page links to 10 different sites, each of these 10 links, internal and external, is going to get an equal amount of PR. So the higher the PR of the page that is linking and the fewer links the page links to, the more authority the linked page will receive from the link.
In general, the more internal blog pages you are linking to from each blog page, and the fewer external links you are linking to, the more authority your blog will maintain as a whole, as authority will continue to circulate around your blog pages.
Note that link juice is passed through all links. Every single linked page from your blog receives a percentage of the PR assigned from the page you link from. Each link counts, including “Contact Page” or “Email This” link and does take up the authority of your original page.
So for you it is important to consider all the different pages you link to on your blog. Think about which pages are important to you, which pages would you like to rank high in search engines and which pages deserve the passed authority.
How do I prevent link juice leakage?
The “nofollow” attribute on individual links is a mechanism that gives bloggers the ability to modify link juice/authority flow. For Google, nofollow links are dropped out of the link graph and are not counted.
You can employ nofollow attribute on your blog sites to limit the amount of link juice that flows out of your blog page to external pages on different domains, or you can use it to control where the link juice will flow to within your blog and the internal blog pages.
How do I use the nofollow attribute?
Add the rel=”nofollow” attribute in the links you do not want to send the link juice to. Add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to all the links that you do not want to be taking from the authority that could be recycled back onto your blog.
This is how a normal link looks like:
<a href=”http://www.google.com”>Google</a>
This is how a link with rel=”nofollow” attribute looks like:
<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.google.com”>Google</a>
Hopefully, this is another step of search engines optimization of your blog, that will eventually result in your blog ranking high for your blog content relevant keywords.
Join thousands of bloggers and get all my blogging tips for FREE! Subscribe to HowToMakeMyBlog via RSS or via e-mail.
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
Great information! This is something I can understand.
Nice article! I also tend to add internal links to my posts every now and then but I always keep in mind the people who are visiting my website.
My philosophy is to always do what’s best for my visitors and since the progress of technology is inevitable, Google will eventually evolve enough to take the user friendly things from my site into account.
I do things as best as I can and hope that technology will follow up
(I know it might sound a bit stupid).
Stumbled it as well – it’ll be interesting to know if it gets you any extra traffic!
Yeah always thinking about the readers as well. If there is a resource you can link to for further information etc, then why not. You should not be afraid of your readers leaving the page and not coming back.
I may do a StumbleUpon traffic case study in near future as I have some data now to analyse from. I will keep you updated.
Once I lost all of my PR in the last update I too decided that I would focus more on writing for my users and not Google.
I would like to have my PR back though, so I have implemented tips like this to help.
STUMBLED!
Thanks! I am not sure why you lost your PR, you might have a better idea. Implementing some of these tips I have written would hopefully help get some authority back. Also I would recommend you to get in touch with Google directly at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en and ask for a reconsideration of their decision to take your PR.
While I respect the fact that everyone may have different views and so on. I personally think this notion of leaking page rank by going no follow is a bit silly. Basic SEO is to have both quality outbound and inbound links using good anchor text. Google especially wants you link out to other relevant quality blogs and websites.
Thanks for the comment! I agree with you, links to relevant, quality content posts are fine. I would suggest using nofollow in unimportant links like affiliate links, Wiki, Google, “privacy”, “terms and conditions” etc.
Great info. Thanks
“In general, the more internal blog pages you are linking to from each blog page, and the fewer external links you are linking to, the more authority your blog will maintain as a whole, as authority will continue to circulate around your blog pages.”
I think it is so crazy how everyone seems to be talking about link building strategies. I say that you can get good search engine traffic if you target keywords that have hardly any competition.
‘I would suggest using nofollow in unimportant links like ……“privacy”, “terms and conditions” etc.’
I actually used to follow this train of thought till about 2 weeks ago :p think of it this way…if 100 links = PR 1 and 10 PR 1 links = PR 2, which link would you rather have?
Let me elaborate Those 100 links are pointing to ‘privacy page’ and that page is pointing to your homepage/ top post etc. The link from the privacy page will carry more ‘juice’ then the 100 links would if that page was already PR1, as it is harder to rank / acquire juice form 100 PR0 links then 1 PR1.
Hi Marko,
I have a question about link farms that I’m hoping you can shed some light on!
In my blog posts, I like to conclude with, “If you found This Article helpful, try:” and link to 3 related articles in bullet form. (here’s an example if that isn’t clear http://theadventurouswriter.com/blog/quipsandtipsforachievinggoals/653).
Plus I have an automatic “Related Posts” tool, that supplies 5 or so related posts (which aren’t always the same as my own manually generated related articles).
Does Google count this as a “link farm”? Do you think my Page Rank is negatively affected? I’m a 3 out of 10 right now, and started this blog in July 2008.
Thanks for your help!
Laurie
@Laurie PK – I do not think 8 instead of 5 links will negatively affect your blog SEO-wise. But you should think of your visitors, maybe you give them too much choice? Sometimes when you have too much choice to click on, you can have hard time choosing one.
This is a great website. Valuable information and an awesome learning tool!
(and thanks!)
I now add “nofollow” to many of my links and am looking forward to the benefits of optimizing my site! Cheers
-Thomas
Google changed the way it handles “nofollow” earlier this year. As I understand it, the previous way was:
A page with a PR10 with 10 links and 5 of them are nofollowed, will have that PR10 concentrated in the remaining links that are dofollow. So each dofollow link now passes PR2 linkjuice instead of PR1.
The current way Google handles this as I understand it is that that the nofollow links “waste” pagerank . In other words, the 5 dofollow links will still only pass PR1 linkjuice.
I may misunderstand, so for reference, read the relevant article by Matt Cutts (of Google) here:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/
@Joseph Hollak – The thinking behind it is to link to the pages you want to be indexed in SE so search engines can easily find them and crawl them. So my blog main page is PR4 and by linking to important pages from there I will have a lot of PR juice going to those pages and hopefully help them rank higher. And if I put nofollow in all unimportant links it will help even more as by decreasing number of links it will give more PR juice to the each dofollow link as link juice is divided by the number of dofollow links.