This post was originally posted Nov 7, 2006 – I have added a screenshot as the original subject site is no longer online – it is still just as relevant today as it was over 3 years ago. In places I have added some additional commentary or expanded on original ideas.

References to PageRank should be looked on as synonymous with Google Juice & overall site authority, and not just green pixels in a toolbar, though that can be a good visual indicator at times.

How a Blogroll can kill your PageRank

I followed a link from Digg a few minutes a go, read the story, and as I frequently do on any site I visit, I snooped around a little.

I actually do exactly the same every time someone writes a blog post referring to me and pings my blog. It is the polite thing to do, and maybe I can add something to the conversation. It also allows me to relate any comment to the person who is writing about me, either positively or negatively. Everyone is entitled to opposing views. What is often important is why they have an opposing view, and it isn’t always obvious.

Now about the site in question:

1. I have only read half of one article there, so I don’t know much about the site contents
2. The reason I am linking through to the site is purely from an SEO point of view
3. This is a very common problem, very easy to make, and honestly not too hard to correct.

With that said, here is the site Kerry Fox Live (Archive.org link – the site seems to have been offline for 2 years.)

Initial Site Analysis

So the first thing I notice is that it is a PR3 site.

The internal categories are mainly PR2

The archives are mainly PR2

The individual post pages are generally PR1 or unranked

A large proportion of the content is duplicate syndicated content from services such as Associated Press, without any wrapping

But the site has been around for 16 months

You can make a splog, chuck duplicate content at it, and get a PR4 or PR5 after a few months.

So what is wrong with the site?

Take a look at the sidebar

At a guess (I am seriously not going to count them all), only 20% of the links on any given page point to an internal page. (yes that sidebar is on every page)
There are 2 blogrolls, one of which seems to be websites and blogs he likes, and the other is a whole load of press related sites… news sources.

Every single one of those links is a live external link leaking PageRank to other sites. Those other sites are not reciprocating in any way.

Now I am sure someone is likely to point out that those links provide a service for visitors, and maybe add a little authenticity to the site.

What visitors?

We are looking at a news site with an Alexa rank of close to 2M – not 2k, but 2M

Now there are times you want to sacrifice a little page rank to other sites, especially if they are reciprocating, sharing visitors, or in the case of my blog, I like visitors commenting and joing my “community”. You might also do it in a carefully controlled way from a mininet to one of your own sites.

Solutions

Get rid of the blogroll on all internal pages. It is giving away too much traffic to other sites, not to mention PageRank.

Add nofollow to all the blogroll links that are not reciprocating, or you don’t want to be overly friendly with. (Update August 2010 I would probably tend to use javascript in some way)

Increase internal linking to compensate for all the leakage.

How to Increase Internal Linking

• Recent posts – 10 links
• Top Posts – 10 links
• Recent Comments – 5 – 10 links
• Tagging + Tag Cloud – 50+ links
• There wouldn’t be a need for as much internal ball linking if there wasn’t so many external leaks. The site is gaining very few comments.
• Related posts – 5-10 links
• Related reviews – 5-10 links
• Glossary links

Emphasis should be placed on the links you wish visitors to traverse

External Linking

The site has 2 visible external links to the front page. I am not sure how many to internal pages, but even if it did have external links, any PR given would immediate leak.

Just syndicating one article will generate loads of backlinks, far in excess of what you can achieve with a single blog post (unless you have 100k+ readers). Based on my analysis of “A” list bloggers, their average blog post might normally generate around 10 backlinks (showing in Google).

(update August 2010: – whilst many of the bloggers I analysed in 2006 have 10x as many subscribers by RSS & email now, the number of links they receive, other than from splogs & social media probably hasn’t increased)

Conclusion

It is not rocket science, just simple maths.

If you have 100 external links on every page of your site, you need lot of internal links to retain some (hopefully most) of your PageRank, and it would certain help if those people you give a link to on your sidebar reciprocate in some manner.

(please note that includes me – don’t put a link in your blogroll to my site – sure I appreciate the links, but I would much prefer just an occasional mention in your blog)

If you can’t get a reciprocal link, use nofollow, (August 2010 – blocked external javascript), or stick them on their own seperate page so they don’t suck your own site dry.

And finally… this site structure plagues a huge proportion of blogs. Other blog owners who do not have this problem, quite likely don’t even realise why.

Further reading:

Revenge of the Mininet | 3rd Party content | Blog Comments | No Follow

Update: whilst I am still a fan of article marketing, I no longer recommend any service that doesn’t provide a way to have unique passwords for each distribution site.

As the Sphinn user base increases, finding the wheat among the chaff becomes more time consuming.

In the future Sphinn will allow some sort of filtering based upon your friends, but what can you do now to maximise the signal to noise ratio?

The Front Page Of Sphinn

This is an obvious stop, and hopefully it won’t be filled with “made For Sphinn” articles every day.

Sphinn Greatest Hits

Eventually this will contain a superb overview of the online marketing industry, though as Sphinn is still very new, a lot of the current top posts are related to Sphinn.

Sphinn Upcoming Most Popular

I found a gem from Danny Sullivan in a comment and wanted to highlight how much time this can save.

… I strongly recommend scanning What’s New and then resorting it by Most Sphinns So Far:

http://sphinn.com/upcoming/mostpopular/

You’ll quickly find some gems that have been spotted by others over time but yet to pop. Plenty of traction there.

Find An Active Friend

Find a friend who is highly active on Sphinn, and whose judgement of good stories meets your own tastes. For me an ideal choice is Maki from DoshDosh who seems to have taken a liking to Sphinn and visits every day.

Maki’s Latest Sphinns is a great place to find hot upcoming stories that haven’t made the previously mentioned lists.

Top Posts By Category

This is a great way to find the very best content related to your interests, and much more useful than the greatest hits currently.

My favourite haunts are actually in some of the subcategories that are easily missed.

Other Online Marketing – lots of hidden gems
Affiliate Marketing – currently a bit of a ghost town

For social media, I tend to look at the parent group, because I am interested in all the topics which include Blogging and various social bookmarking and news sites.

Categories are also available for latest hits, such as the Google Category that might be of great interest for search industry watchers and pundits. You will find lots of things here that never reach the major news channels, for better or worse.

The Newest Of The New

If you have some time available to sift through the latest submissions, you can find some good content worthy of your attention. I rarely have time to click beyond the first page.

Example Great Stories From 5 Minutes Browsing

What Not To Do With Your Business Blog – Lee Odden on things that annoy him about business blogs. This is something I have been meaning to write about, and Lee saved me lots of time. I agree with every single point he raised.

11 Tips to Enhance Your Digg User Experience (and Hopefully Bring You Front Page Fame) – Tamar is on my Digg friends list, but also on Pownce and Twitter – the strategies she discussses I know she uses, and it has brought her success. It is a shame she didn’t go into more detail on Digg Friends.

Google; “You can put 50+ words in your title tag, we’ll read it” – real unique research is popular on Sphinn and Shawn proves it. This Ethical SEO experiment is also worthy of attention.

Google Wants Feedback on Removing PageRank Score – Tamar gets 2 links in one post but this highlights the fact that Google get involved a lot in online forums, though quite often not their own ([cough] Toolbar Buttons) and this is in relation to the Google Toolbar showing Pagerank.
My suggestion is a gradient scale, maybe involving more than one colour.

I can just imagine someone using a colour picker and saying “My Google rating is somewhere between #FE3 and #d71”

I love Ezine Articles, and the blog is one I read “religiously”. Bloggers can learn an awful lot from Article Marketing, and in fact I recommend that all bloggers also use article marketing especially when they have a new blog with low readership.

Optiniche has one of the best guides for creating a comments policy.

My own comments policy was prompted by Optiniche rather than inspired, though I have followed a lot of the general framework.

I rarely get human posted spam comments, and Spam Karma captures all the automated comments flawlessly.

1. Are your most frequently clicked links for your subscriber buttons? – long-term subscribers are the lifeblood of any blog or website, and are immune to the whims of search engines
2. Recommendations for your content on social networks and bookmarking sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us or Mybloglog (without you gaming them)
3. Trackbacks and links – when people want to tell their own readership about what you are talking about. Links also help in the search engines
4. When you gain the same traffic for posts with crappy titles as “linkbait” posts – titles are important, but it is much better that a reader expects every post you write to contain value, irrespective of the title.
5. Real Comments and Discussion – I honestly prefer for people to totally disagree with what I write and tell me so (and why), than give me comments like “I agree”
6. Increased revenue per visitor – the more traffic you throw at a site, the more money you will make, but that is like putting the cart before the horse. If you engage your visitors they are much more likely to stick around.
7. Increased targetted traffic – linkbaiting is great, but if it doesn’t eventually bring you more measurable targetted traffic, it is pretty pointless

Thoughts for the future

Will we start seeing linkbait blindness?
How many tools do you use for tracking various results?
Are your average page views per visitor less than 2?
What percentage of your visitors leave a comment?

It is not just a numbers game, it is also a conversions game