Optimal Site Layout Question (PageRank "sculpting")
- SEO |
Pitching for a gig on an article/vouchers site that needs a 90% pure white hat approach. Noticed a lot of their indexed subpages have a PageAuthority of 1. Not PageRank. OpenSiteExplorer's PA.
Isn't this is usually down to poor internal linking (as well as 0 external links) to the subpages? Some of these pages are 2-3 months old - it's a newish PR2 site (7 months?) so it will be pretty well indexed.
Vaguely remember an article about how to structure a site for best distribution of "PageRank" when I was trying to find out about "PageRank sculpting" and think the recommendation was a tiered category approach ("try to do less than 100 links per page") with 3 levels - 4 maximum.
The strategy I'm pitching is two-fold - high quality articles for link bait (with outreach, etc. etc.) and lower quality "information" style articles targeting low competition long tail keywords (with 120-1500 monthly searches). If I want the subpages to rank well, I need to jam as much of the homepage's PA as possible their way. A lot of information I've read suggests that PR sculpting is dead... but pages linked from the homepage tend to perform better when optimisation for a keyword is (unintentionally) similar.
So the plan is to keep the links for newer articles on the homepage for about a month, then keep them about 1 layer down - avoiding the mythical "over 100 links" scenario. Basically everything in this article Successful Site Architecture for SEO [SES London 2011] | SEOmoz
I've also got an overly elaborate plan to create links within the articles to "related articles" (tldr version - most visited pages get links to longtail info pages that get most searches/month).
Questions. Is this a good idea? Am I talking shit? And what's the effect likely to be on the subpages when they drop from having a sexy frontpage link to a dirty smelly category page link.
Isn't this is usually down to poor internal linking (as well as 0 external links) to the subpages? Some of these pages are 2-3 months old - it's a newish PR2 site (7 months?) so it will be pretty well indexed.
Vaguely remember an article about how to structure a site for best distribution of "PageRank" when I was trying to find out about "PageRank sculpting" and think the recommendation was a tiered category approach ("try to do less than 100 links per page") with 3 levels - 4 maximum.
The strategy I'm pitching is two-fold - high quality articles for link bait (with outreach, etc. etc.) and lower quality "information" style articles targeting low competition long tail keywords (with 120-1500 monthly searches). If I want the subpages to rank well, I need to jam as much of the homepage's PA as possible their way. A lot of information I've read suggests that PR sculpting is dead... but pages linked from the homepage tend to perform better when optimisation for a keyword is (unintentionally) similar.
So the plan is to keep the links for newer articles on the homepage for about a month, then keep them about 1 layer down - avoiding the mythical "over 100 links" scenario. Basically everything in this article Successful Site Architecture for SEO [SES London 2011] | SEOmoz
I've also got an overly elaborate plan to create links within the articles to "related articles" (tldr version - most visited pages get links to longtail info pages that get most searches/month).
Questions. Is this a good idea? Am I talking shit? And what's the effect likely to be on the subpages when they drop from having a sexy frontpage link to a dirty smelly category page link.