In the series ‘how to manipulate google‘ : pagerank sculpting 101.
If I build a site about “LCD television” and want to promote three specific brands/offers, I want Google to index the product/offer-pages as most important in the site, and not the index page.
How do I achieve that ?
Some basic theory : I have two rings of pages, one with four pages (B), and one with three (A), linked over one page (AB),
.
…after running that through a pagerank simulation, I get these results :
| item | importance |
| b | 0.97 |
| ab | 1.60 |
| a | 0.73 |
…the linking page (AB) sheds its juice to two rings, 3/5 vs 2/5, and by doing so drains the smaller ring. Being the only page that gets links and juice from all other pages, the ab-page itself scores the highest ‘importance’ in the website.
Conclusion : adding some subpages in a smaller ring to a page makes it relatively more important in the website.
| item | importance |
| home, prod1, prod3 | 0.97 |
| prod2 | 1.60 |
| sub | 0.73 |
Let’s add some more subrings :
| item | importance |
| I, Prod1 | 0.96 |
| Prod2, 3 | 1.58 |
| sub | 0.72 |
| item | importance | |
| home | 0.94 | |
| Prod 1,2,3 | 1.56 | |
| sub | 0.72 |
The importance of the product pages seems to drop, but the ratio prod-n/home improves, so it works out better.
Home-links
By not linking back to the index page from the subpages, the product pages end up with a higher rank within the site.
If I do link from each subpage (S) to the index page (home) (what wordpress themes generally do)
…I get these results…
| item | importance |
| home | 1.91 |
| Prod 1,2,3 | 1.54 |
| Sub | 0.57 |
…the home page is indicated as most important in the site, which isn’t what I wanted, so I omit the home-link on subpages.
End of the sculpting session.
(note: this is, of course, all theoretic)