Page Rank Sculpting
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This is the second part of a two-part article on page rank optimization and page rank sculpting. To understand it better, please read the first article . It covers such topics as relevancy vs importance, how PR is calculated, dampening factor and more. In this article, we'll discuss page rank from external link, the explicit principles of page rank sculpting, and more.
Page rank cannot exceed the number of pages on the Internet. If each page's vote (link) is counted as 1 point, and there are 5 billion web pages on the Internet, then total page rank cannot exceed 5 billion points.
On the other hand, one page can have more than one vote or one page rank point. The same principle applies on the site wide level. For example, if there are 100 pages on a website, with no external links, then there's 100 page rank points to be distributed between those pages. To highlight the importance of X page to Google, increase the number of internal pages that link to X.
Once external links enter the equation, the game changes, as more page rank flows in.
Page Rank from External Links
The primary way to get rankings is to get links from outside websites. As more websites link, they pass more page rank and make a page become more important in terms of page rank. Once additional page rank flows into the website from outside websites, that page rank can be distributed internally, to help other internal pages rank.
But not all links are equal. You've heard that many times. Sometimes 10 links can have a value of 100 links. For instance, let's assume "pageX" has 100 links and "pageY" has 50 links. Here's the visual:
| Total Number of External Links | Total Value of Page Rank From External Links |
pageX | 100 | 300 |
pageY | 50 | 250 |
The question you may be asking is, why does "pageY" have 250 PR points (remember that real page rank is counted with large values) with only 50 links, while "pageX" only has 300 PR points with twice the amount of links? The reason this can occur is simple - the 50 links that point to "pageY" are more powerful individually in terms of page rank values than those pointing to "pageX."
This is why you hear SEOs state that it's better to have one link from a high-quality site than 10 links from lower-quality sites. If that one link is worth 1000 PR points and 10 links combined are only worth 100 points, then the one quality link is going to pass 10 times more value than the lower-quality ones. This means it will have much more impact on rankings. This is the reason SEOs want links from high PR websites, because those are the links that count the most.
NOTE: If you're wondering how page rank value can exceed 10, than you need to understand that the Google Toolbar value is not real. Real page ranks use long numerical values for page rank computation. Toolbar page rank shows a range, not the real page rank. For a detailed explanation read my previous article on page rank sculpting.
So we have "pageX" with 100 external links and 300 PR points, and "pageY" with 50 external links and 250 PR points. Let's simplify this further. Let's assume that there's a total of 10 pages on the site, and the pages noted above are the only ones with external links. This gives us a total of ten pages, and the following table:
| Total PR points |
8 pages without links | 1 per each page, for a total of 8 points. |
pageX | 300 |
pageY | 250 |
As you can see, pageX and pageY are MUCH more powerful in terms of page rank than the eight other pages. You can use their power to help the other pages rank better. We'll explain this on the third page of this article, but before we do let's overview navigation, which is essential.
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