The structure of a site can impact on the pagerank of individual pages and this article tries to illustrate the concepts behind this and the importance of Link Popularity.

Pagerank was defined in the original Google article as

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))  where d is a dampening factor commonly believed to be 0.85.

So pagerank of page A is 0.15 plus a little bit of the pagerank of each page that links to it ( this share relates to the pagerank of the linking page divided by the number of outbound links on the page).

Thinking of this it can be seen that:-

• adding pages increases the total potential pagerank of a site
• inbound links increase the total pagerank within a site
• pagerank can be distributed around the site by changing the linking structure to funnel it to important pages
• poor linking structures can prevent a site achieving its maximum potential aggregated pagerank as some links are not established
• the allocation of pagerank can leak out of a site when it links outwards (unless using the rel=nofollow tag )

Accordingly it is important to consider the structure of a site and ensure that pagerank is shepherded to the important pages in the site.  In this way they will have higher pagerank and a better ranking in the search engine index.

Some other points to note are

• Pagerank goes from 1 to 10
• the increase is probably logarithmic
• pages with no links to them are classed as orphans by Google and excluded from the pagerank calculations which are iterative

There is an excellent, but complicated, article on this at http://webworkshop.net/pagerank.html

Googles latest algorithm and infrastructure updates, known as Big Daddy, have been causing waves on the Internet and complete confusion as to what the changes mean.

Matt Cutts, a senior Google search engineer, has now clarified all in an article on his blog.  It is very long and has resulted in a great deal of response comment. To save you reading it I can summarise the main points here.

The Big Daddy update is complete.

Google is intentionally crawling more pages from a site than they will index.

Make your site functionally correct before emphasising link building. Check – are all of my pages reachable with a text browser from a root page without going through exotic code. Try having a site map on your site. After you’re site is crawlable, then work on the HOOK (content) that makes your site interesting/useful and attracts links.

Make sure that your site is using your PageRank well. A tree structure with a certain fanout at each level is usually a good way of doing it.

Links are now very, very important.

Reciprocal links are declining in value.  The quality and relevance of inbound links is more important.

Affiliate Out Bound Links are not helping crawling and indexing. There is some speculation that an abundance of affiliate OBLs is now having a negative effect on rankings.

The best way to gather links is to offer services or information that attract visitors and links on your own. Things like blogs are a great way to attract links.

The supplemental index is a back fill for the main index, used when insufficient relevant entries exist in the main index.

The supplemental results are typically refreshed less often than the main results

If your site does not have many inbound links it may not make it into the main index, it certainly will be crawled less and could exist only in the supplemental index.

The message is very clear.  Sites must try harder to develop quality inbound links.

Prepare for the future and develop an effective and targeted link building program now or face the prospect of living without Google search traffic.

There is no doubt that Google is having some considerable problems despite the silence and lack of information flowing out of its headquarters.

Read the online forums and news articles. Whilst there has always been a strand of comment to the effect that – my site is not fully indexed, it must be a Google problem, there is a common theme flowing from industry sources which suggests that all is not well.

Long established sites loose 30% of their indexed pages.

Authoratitive sites loose 25% of their inbound links and their Link Popularity falls away.

The site enquiry returns a different number of pages daily for the indexed pages total in large sites.

New sites take weeks to be indexed but googlebot visits them every day.

Old pages turn up in the supplementary index cache, sometimes the pages are 12 to 18 months old.

The stockmarket is littered with major brands that did not survive. You are only as good as the service you offer and Google is very close to a tipping point when users switch to alternative search engines to get better quality results.

Once this happens market share declines, this has an impact on forecast advertising revenue and, as a public stock, the share price gets hammered. Low share price equates to low funds available for investment and the future is gone.

I hope the mega brains at Google get a handle on the current situation quickly as the service and quality of search results used to be excellent.

In the meantime it is hard to feel too much sympathy when you reflect on the thousands of much smaller businesses who are having a rough time because Google has messed up the indexing of their sites and visitor volumes have fallen away.

When running Link Popularity reviews for clients I often see blogger sites appearing in the links to competitors sites.

The parent site has a page rank of 9 although the blog sites it spawns have lower rank with pages starting at 0 like every other site.

I wondered whether this was a valuable Search Engine Optimisation tactic or an opportunity that could not be followed through. Whilst it is easy to open a blogger blog all the usual site M.I. is missing. You do not know when googlebot visits and what pages are being crawled.

The only way to answer the question is to experiment and observe so the account was opened last week.

The site is up and running and called Selected internet sites to give some element of respectability.

If you were wondering what the purpose of this article was I will tell you. This site gets crawled regularly by googlebot so this article contains a link to the Selected internet sites to send it to the blogger account and force it to index the site.

After that I will start experimenting with links from the blogger account to other sites I own to check the value of the link popularity.

There are many articles on the web about the value of pay per click campaigns and using Adwords. I do not dispute these but note that they all focus on the end result and not the practical steps in setting up your campaign.

One important point is the time it takes for Google to put your campaign live.

Search the Adwords site and you will find good content and guides on how to set up the campaign.

The system has a starter and a standard edition which removes many of the more complex options for the first time starter. If you use trademarked terms the system advises you immediately so that you can apply a correction straight away without incurring a subsequent delay.

Notwithstanding all this there is nothing that explicitly tells you that your campaign will not be live the same day you have opened your account and input the campaign details.

Did you know that there is a manual editorial process and did you realise that this can delay your campaign going live?

The lesson is that once you are thinking of using Adwords you should open your account and set up the campaign to get through this editorial control. Once approved you can pause the campaign to suspend the expenditure whilst you are waiting for the correct timing.