Do your own pages act as votes?

[lee_vhoi_ol]

Take this situation:
Say I have 2,000 pages all indexed in Google. The main page is PR 0. The other pages are also PR 0. Then I point funnel all links on these 2,000 pages to the main page. Will this significantly increase my main page? And then assuming I'm not leaking any PR into those 2,000 indexed pages from the main page.

I was wondering if your own pages act as votes.

[hooperman]

Internal links are votes, but they probably carry as much weight as any other vote for yourself.

Your internal pages do contribute PR though, but who knows how much 2,000 will give? I think Aspen posted something about attaining a PR 7 home page on internal links alone, but I couldn't tell you where to look for it.

[DaveWoods]

Maybe a little but certainly not a tactic that I'd suggest using as you would only have one link on all these 2000 pages and all they'd do is take the user to the homepage of the site.

What you should be doing is having a navigation which easily enables your users to navigate around your site... what you're proposing is essentially having a back button on all your 2000 pages.

It helps to have links back to your homepage on all pages of your site but the main benefit of this is for your users which should be the top priority.

[DaveWoods]

I think Aspen posted something about attaining a PR 7 home page on internal links alone, but I couldn't tell you where to look for it.

I'd be interested to read that. Presumably this was by writing good content that people wanted to link to, attaining a high PR on these sub-pages and then passing a percentage of this from all the subpages to the homepage?

I can't imagine that having a site with all low PR pages you'd be able to significantly impact the PR of the homepage, even if you linked 2 million of these subpages to the homepage?

[lee_vhoi_ol]

thanks, i was just curious about the idea.

[stymiee]

I think Aspen posted something about attaining a PR 7 home page on internal links alone, but I couldn't tell you where to look for it.

PR channels all the same regardless of page location. The value of a link will vary by location (e.g. other site, your site, related page, etc..)

[searchmaster]

yes they are vote....

but your main page should have some weight-age to transfer to internal pages

[lee_vhoi_ol]

so I'm assuming the value of the link is much less when it comes from internal pages, stymiee??

[stymiee]

so I'm assuming the value of the link is much less when it comes from internal pages, stymiee??

No. There is no such thing as internal pages to Google. Every page is judged on its own merit. If that internal page is viewed as strong by Google then a link from it will be strong.

[galen]

I guess it would be possible to get a good PR based solely on internal linkage. If you could get google to index enough pages and have them all point to your main page. Sounds like a nice experiment.

[dvduval]

For me this is a tough one. The short answer is "yes", but I think there is way more to it. Generally speaking, if you can be successful in creating a strategy to produce popular internal pages, that get external links to them, this is a really good thing.

[aspen]

Each page has a minimum PR of "1-d", so yes, you can manufacture PageRank by getting thousands/millions of pages indexed (and yes, you'd need millions to get a sizeable PR out of it) and have them all link to one page.

However... this is good for theory only, there is no practical application because of a simple catch 22. You have to get those pages indexed, and Google's crawl depth is largely based on PR, so you'll never have a chance to manufacture PR with millions of PR 0 pages, because Google will not index all of them.

[lee_vhoi_ol]

thanks all. It's just something for thought.

[JJMcClure]

This seems illogical.

If you could raise your PR by creating tons of internal links then Google would get spammed to death by people making millions of internally linking pages for each of their sites.

I don't believe for one second that this would work and it wouldn't surprise me if you would in fact get penalised for it.

[stymiee]

This seems illogical.

If you could raise your PR by creating tons of internal links then Google would get spammed to death by people making millions of internally linking pages for each of their sites.

I don't believe for one second that this would work and it wouldn't surprise me if you would in fact get penalised for it.

You need to read aspen's post two posts above yours as it clearly explains the reality of this. You should also read up on the PR formula which would explain why it is technically possible.

[JJMcClure]

You need to read aspen's post two posts above yours as it clearly explains the reality of this. You should also read up on the PR formula which would explain why it is technically possible.

I did and I didn't think that Google would fail to notice millions of pages with 0PR all suddenly pointing to one page.

It may be technically possible but I don't think it would work.

[stymiee]

It wouldn't work for the reason aspen said: the low PR pages will more or less be ignored by Google making the PR they channel to other pages non-existent. Until the PR of those inner pages improved and Google acknowledged their existence it won't get the site very far.

There's no need for Google to worry about it for the reason above plus if the pages are duplicate content (and thus created for the sake of generating PR) they will be ignored anyway. Basically it isn't worth doing unless you can create a very large volume of quality unique content which is very hard to do.

[USPB]

yes, its called internal links since SE wants to have a good internal link structure

[stymiee]

yes, its called internal links since SE wants to have a good internal link structure

Search engines don't care about your internal linking structure. The webmaster should care though as it can be a powerful way to ensure you give weight to main pages and channel PR effectively through your website.

[lee_vhoi_ol]

The problem i think, is how you get all those pages indexed, for them to pass any PR at all. Or can unindexed, but already crawled, sites pass PR as well?

[JJMcClure]

Search engines don't care about your internal linking structure.

What does that mean? I would have thought that just from a spidering point of view it matters, but are you saying that it doesn't benefit you in the rankings in any way?

[stymiee]

The problem i think, is how you get all those pages indexed, for them to pass any PR at all. Or can unindexed, but already crawled, sites pass PR as well?

If they aren't in the index they essentially don't exist.

What does that mean? I would have thought that just from a spidering point of view it matters, but are you saying that it doesn't benefit you in the rankings in any way?

It does benefit you if you do it right but not because it is done a certainw ay the search engines prefer but because it was done a certain way that emphasis important content. Their are no arbitrary bonuses for having a certain internal linking structure.