Tue, 2005-02-22 22:29
Hi,
When you're embarking on a links campaign does it matter what page in your site the links come into? If you have say, a site that deals with multiple topics should a link from a particular site come into a page that relates to that site? Or doesn't it matter and you just have people link to your www domain and the spiders record the link and spider your content from there and assign PR to the fact that there was a link and then the content on the pages.
Thanks for your time,
Rischen
Wed, 2005-02-23 01:32
#1
links coming into your site
Hi Rischen,
If sites link to any page it will help that "page" rank.
If you have everyone linking to your domain home page and that page has content such as a description of all the other pages it should get higher ranking.
If on the other hand the index page has no real content then having a high page rank will be pretty much useless and wont show up in searches.
So really the best solution depends on the site.
Hope that helps
Wed, 2005-02-23 07:47
#2
links coming into your site
This article might not be 100% accurate but it should give you an insite into the PR/linking issue > http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html
EDIT: Having posted the above link, I have just read it through again and was concerned about the fact that incoming links usually consist only of the domain name ( e.g. http://www.whatever.com ), whereas the actual home page will normally be a file such as index.php. The article suggests that spiders see these as different URLs, therefore disassociating the Page Rank scoring components.
In my case, I have developed a CMS product that could potentially make this situation worse as the URL contains a manipulated file path that includes a reference to the page's content within a database ( e.g. http://www.whatever.com/somepage.php/123 ).
However, I was relieved to discover (and this might also apply to you) that Google does relate the two URLs as being one and the same, contrary to what the article suggests (the author says this is unlikely). I have proved this by noting the results from link:www.whatever.com and comparing them with link:www.whatever.com/somepage.php/123 (obviously I used a real site reference). They are identical. Whereas link:www.whatever.com/somepage.php (no such URL as there will always be slash-figures following somepage.php) gives zero results. This shows that Google is comparing and associating the content displayed by the two URLs, not trying to analyse the file paths in any way. I can stop worrying now 
Comments anyone?