Is Your Site A PageRank Dead End?

You don’t want all the hard work you put into building your site, developing content and gaining high ranking back links to go to waste, so don’t set yourself up for failure by making your site a PageRank dead end. To understand the concept of PageRank flow it often times helps to look at it like the flow of traffic on a roadway. Each followed back link you get to your site from other reputable sites is like putting another car on the roadway and guess what, they are all heading straight for your house.do_not_enter

If you want the flow of traffic to be manageable, you most certainly don’t want to direct all that traffic down a dead end road with no outlet, if you do then the powers that be will come in and put up road blocks to prevent all that traffic from going nowhere, and this is exactly what Google will do with your incoming PageRank “juice” if its all funneling into your site and has nowhere to go. The term “dangling page” has been used to describe a page such as this, where it has incoming links but no outgoing links. When Google comes across a  page like this it is assumed to not be finished or to not be of any value so Google will ignore it, as far as PageRank is concerned it will just not exist. Understanding this can be very useful when you are setting up the navigational structure on your next site or when you are optimizing your current ones.

It is very important to have an effective on site linking plan as part of your overall site design. Effectively linking to content with more importance and not linking, or nofollowing links to content that is not important will go a long way towards directing and keeping your PageRank on the content you want and off the content you don’t want to waste it on such as your contact pages or other “secondary” pages that aren’t a key part of your site.

The sites this will have the largest direct impact on will obviously be sites like that great sales page you just made to promote your newest product or service, if it is one page and has no navigation structure you should change it. By giving the bots something to crawl on it they will crawl those links, and the PageRank juice will continue to flow. Even if your page just consists of followed internal links to about pages, contact forms or a testimonial page that will be enough to let the bots know the site is complete and that it’s not a dead end or as it’s referred to now, a dangling page. By effectively managing your PageRank you can ensure your site ranks well on Google, in turn getting you the traffic you so badly need.

This is just one example showing why you should not nofollow every link on your site. By effectively directing the flow of PageRank on your site you can not only tailor what content acquires PageRank, you can also give the bots something to follow showing them that your site is worth crawling and that it is complete. If you have any questions, comments or concerns please don’t hesitate to comment on this post.

3 thoughts on “Is Your Site A PageRank Dead End?”

  1. I haven’t paid much attention to nofollowing or following. I think it’s beneficial to offer references and further reading from any article and that’s done via links. Overthinking how much juice you pass will, in most cases, just complicate things too much.

    I believe that at some point in the future, Google’s PageRank and other algorithms, as well as other search engines, will learn to love the real content and valid linking for references and thus, push search engine rankings towards true “smartness” and quality.
    .-= Zemalf@Blogging Tips´s last blog ..How I Pushed My Blog from PageRank 0 to PR4 in 37 Days =-.

  2. Hi,

    Thank you for sharing this with me. I am very much into web design and seo.

    I originally did not come here looking for this, but when I found it, I was glad I did.

    I believe these tip can enhance search results link building.
    i just started my SEO company, and I want to build it right from the begining.

    Do these software tools get spotted by search engine and penalize a website?

    I am passionate about giving clients the best service possible and would like to know what is the quickest and most effective way to build a high page rank.

    I also heard someone say that page rank doesn’t have that much credibility anymore.

    Thanks for the valuable information.

    I really appreciate it.
    Anyways, great web design and information.

    Have a great day.

    Thanks alot

    Carrie

  3. “Intra-linKing” is how I’ve think of it… before and I have a great example of wht NOT to do… A few years ago a company came along selling ppc, and setup landing pages for our broker and their ppc plan. My broker thought these were also a website-and they were, but just a website that would never rank, because all the pages ere landing, and “dangling” pages…

    I’m also told, to get the full benefit of your internal links, your link must read from the full http:// even though it doesn’t have to for linking purposes… Any knowledge on that?
    .-= Terry@CharlotteRealEstate´s last blog ..Charlotte Real Estate Over 1M-Luxury Home Market Report =-.

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