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.

I got to skim through this a couple of days ago and need to read it again in more depth and do a lot of planning.

It is free, and well worth downloading.

It is totally different to Stampede Secrets which I reviewed a few months back, or the Authority Black Book which I haven’t reviewed, but I am sure many people have read anyway.

How can 3 ebooks from highly experienced internet marketers on Web 2.0 marketing and traffic generation be totally different, worthy of your time, and in the case of Stampede Traffic, worthy of some cash?

I would look on Authority Black book as a guide to building an authority site with wordpress and promoting it, which is effectively what Jack’s Authority Site Centre is all about, but they build the WordPress sites for you, and trick them out and host them.

Michelle’s Web2.0 Traffic Generation Blueprint is a step by step list of every way she promotes a website. It doesn’t get into possibly complicated decisions about deciding which site might be most appropriate, you end up generating traffic from so many different sources the odds are in your favour that you hit a good source. It should be noted that Michelle works a lot with out-sourcing, and this would be a perfect guide to give to a link builder and say “do this”, and also assign an outsourced writer to work with them.
I suppose rather than creating a mininet, it is more like a “social net” of 100s of interlinked pages on web 2.0 sites & profiles, social bookmarks and news items that eventually lead back to your money sites.

Stampede Traffic is a little more selective – you target the social networks you believe will give you the most traffic and best links, build up credible profiles, and develop “meaningful” communication with other social network users.
In some ways it is also more of an executive “Why are we doing this?” and “How are we doing this?” approach, and gives you some great basics. It is for niche marketers also looking to refine their approach.

All good reads, if you value your time I would read all of them, though I am not sure in which order, probably go for ABB, then Web 2.0 Blueprint, and if you find you need more of the executive overview, in a Marketing Sherpa style report, Stampede Traffic is ideal and extremely well researched.

Update:

Lots of well deserved positive feedback on Michelle’s Web2.0 traffic blog

Sandcastles Theme

I am still playing around with my Sandcastles Theme on a test site (based upon Sandbox) – it will be released fairly soon, but not until I have this site moved over onto new servers.

I thought I would release this now so that those who don’t want to work with a modified Sandbox theme are free to use it, and most people can probably gain some benefit from it anyway, as it will reduce external links on duplicate content pages without having to block them.

Pagerank is based upon pages and relevant links – if you can make all those duplicate content pages unique, and prevent them from leaking too much Google Juice, they are actually useful content for your readers, and you can benefit from having them indexed.

Here are the full release notes for NoFollow Those Dupes, and a direct download link for those chomping at the bit.

I just test things out and track, and I expect my readers to do the same.

I am not an SEO Consultant, in fact if I was I would probably set all my public blogs up in some uniform manner that I would preach to my clients because it would conform to the accepted norms that the rest of the SEO community adhere to – if I create a site that meets accepted norms for my clients, no one could point the finger and say I did a bad job with on-page optimization.
Other SEO Consultants also like to link through to posts that suggest to their clients that everything they have been saying for years is 100% true, so anything that agrees with accepted SEO principles gets more links, and gets read by more professional SEOs.

For you gamblers out there

1+6=7
3+4=7 as well

You get to the same or similar result by taking a different path.

Vicious circle, or benevolent circle… take your pick.

I am not a SEO Geek – I am technical, and extremely creative in thinking up solutions and linking structures, but ultimately I don’t know my way around PHP and .HTAccess enough to be truly one of the “geeks” able to take on any SEO task.

Then again, most of the best Copywriters that I know believe that a lack of a formal education gives them an advantage and can mean enhanced creativity. I can be extremely creative when applying SEO knowledge.

Warning

Apologies in advance, this is going to get fairly “geeky” and I encourage you to bookmark it for future reference, or ask questions in the comments. I will include lots of references where appropriate, and even if this stuff is beyond your current level of understanding, it is a good reference for the future.

I should also warn that this post is quite long and “meandering” – there are 100, 200, maybe more ranking factors and somehow other SEOs are able to place them in a tabular form.
I don’t think tabular, I think in 3D – what could represent some kind of negative factor could also provide positive factors.

Testing

I use multiple techniques, and I test things gradually.

I also haven’t done all the optimization on Andybeard.eu that I would like, partially because Google was reporting bad data that was extremely hard to work with regarding supplemental results – that bad data is also currently still being shown by the Google Toolbar, and doesn’t seem to have been universally fixed for all sites.
I like to write about the changes I make, and like to have some conclusive results to demonstrate both why I might make a change, and also a way of demonstrating the effect.

The aim of this blog was a “work-in-progress” – as I make changes I write about them, or write about the results from testing at a later date.

If you make lots of changes at once, it is very hard to track which one was significant.

Unlike a Sales page, where you can just throw traffic at it using PPC to test conversion rates, with SEO it can take time for things to change.

Questions about SEO?

John Reese has some questions about WordPress SEO

This ties in fairly well with some material I have written in the past, and also the results of a lot of the experimentation I have been doing on this site that I haven’t yet discussed.

I also receive recurring emails on the same subjects, especially when I have hinted at solutions but not yet written about them extensively on this blog. Some of the information in this post I am pulling almost totally from replies I have sent to readers.

SEO Ranking Factors

SEOmoz has a great compiled list of ranking factors, based on the opinions of 37 SEO Experts.

I largely agree with the final conclusions… except… the idea that you should optimize for all of these factors, and avoid all the potential penalties in every situation

Top 10 SEO Ranking Factors

All good stuff…

Top 5 Negative SEO Ranking Factors

It should be noted that there was a huge amount of dispute over some of the following, and only an “average” level of acceptance for the highest items in the list.

A Handful of SEO Questions

John asked a handful of SEO questions and I am going to try to address them

I am not going to claim any of my answers are conclusive, though I have more experience in answering some of them than others.

1. Permalink Post Structure

/name-of-the-post/ or /name-of-the-post.html

I have absolutely no idea. I haven’t tested it, either for click-through or SEO performance.

I chose to use .html on this blog, and in fact on a few more, when I moved content over from Blogspot. At the time blogspot wasn’t providing 301 Redirects so I was using a meta and javascript refresh.

With there only being a change in domain name, and not site structure, I believe there might have been better signals to the search and ranking bots that the meta and javascript redirects were legitimate.

I have seen many experts suggest that making multiple changes in permalink structure is not a good idea.

What I might do sometime in the future purely as a suicidal experiment is switch off the redirects. Most of the links going to my previous domains came from article marketing, so it would drastically reduce my number of incoming links, but conversely change the whole link profile into lots more authoritive links in balance.
One negative aspect of doing that would be the benefit I might be gaining from domain age, and I am sure it would affect specific keywords.

2. Permalink Post Structure Directory ‘Depth’

www.domain.com/name-of-the-post/(or .html) VS. www.domain.com/archives/some/other/folders/name-of-the-post/(or. html)

This gets a little bit complex, because there are lots of issues involved

Using a date in a URL can be an indication that content is “dated” so if you are creating a niche website you might not want to give that visual indicator – conversely, it could be looked on as a positive indicator of how fresh content is – URLs with dates are longer (there are positive and negative issues) – I think this might come down to personal choice.

Even if you don’t use dates in URLs, you will still have date based archives unless you don’t link to them, and block them anyway with robots.txt or a plugin that adds noindex to the pages.

Some SEO experts such as Graywolf would suggest only having an article appear in one category, and only use excerpts in those categories. This is effectively creating a classic tree like structure.

Date based archives are one way a search engine bot can identify your site as being a blog or news site – I am not sure whether that has a positive, negative or neutral ranking benefit.
Article Directories also have RSS feeds, but generally don’t have date based navigation.

If you are publishing a multiple-author blog, there is a chance you might be included eventually in Google News or on Yahoo. I have read (though I can’t remember where) that to be included on Google News there is a requirement to have a unique 4 digit numerical reference within each URL.

3. Tags: Hype Or Reality?

John is looking to know if tag pages on your site can really make a difference.

I have written a lot about tagging with UTW (Ultimate Tag Warrior) – yes that is a tag page.

Michael Arrington from Techcrunch was recently writing negatively about tagging, speculating that Google might block Technorati from search results, because the content they display is in effect a search result based on a particular keyword.
It should also be noted that until extremely recently, Techcrunch was a heavy user of Ultimate Tag Warrior. They have now switched to having personal database pages on a db.techcrunch.com subdomain.
Their tag pages however still exist, and are called their company index.

Rand Fishkin was asking Matt Cutts about search results being indexed within Google search results at SMX and from what I gather, the primary criteria is whether the tagging is useful for users.

Techcrunch obviously has a lot of link juice to throw around, and typically writes more than one post about each company. They do however sometimes talk about multiple companies in a single post, thus there is occasionally some duplicate content appearing on different tag pages.

Techcruch really don’t need tags for SEO purposes, though using tagging might help a little with relevance – they are effectively using tagging as their primary HTML sitemap and show full content.

Thus I would think Techcrunch’s use of tagging is a benefit to readers and highly valuable.

I should also note that there are a lot of blogs in the Technorati Top100 that use internal tagging, with the pages being indexed.
Wordpress.com uses tagging extensively, with all tags being indexed. I am not sure if this is of benefit to searchers.

I am not sure about Technorati’s tagging being of benefit. When a Technorati tag page appears in search results, I personally don’t click on it, but then I would most likely not click on Wikipedia entries either, unless I was specifically looking for a Wikipedia entry.

Youtube might have blocked off tags, but then Google have to be careful of favouritism these days with lots of hungry Bloggers, and lawyers watching their every move and acquisition.
Youtube seems to already be doing well with Universal search. How do Google detect largely duplicate videos?

Whether my own use of tagging is as highly valuable to readers is certainly questionable, but when you look at the limitations of current search engines, I think using tag pages is actually fair game, as long as you don’t abuse things too much by using tags that are not relevant to the content.

The Biggest Benefit of Tagging

Dubious amounts of traffic from Technorati themselves?
Having useful pages for people to link to, not only from their blog posts, but also Wikipedia?

No…

The number one ranking factor was TITLE TAG, and to a lesser extent additional headings

I have been able to gain some additional traffic simply by tagging with and without spaces.

I could also add to the mix various forms of interlinking, the fact that every time someone picks up my content on a splog I gain around 15 links (though low quality generally, some of these sites are PR4+), and how easy it is to spread juice around if you need to.

Tag Pages & Duplicate Content

For the last few months, Google has had what I would regard as “The Google Yoyo”

Here is a chain of events

1. Google had only a few of my pages listed using “site:” though I was still receiving 40% Google search traffic
2. I reported myself for paid links, and a short while later, I had 4000 pages indexed, and almost no supplemental
3. I added a translation plugin – it creates translated cached pages for the whole site, but it only linked from my single pages. (more on that for another blog post)
4. I started gaining more pages indexed, and still no supplemental
5. I started seeing hour by hour different results, sometimes I would have some supplemental results, and they would disappear 10 minutes later.
6. Indexed pages and supplemental results seem to have stabilised

I currently have around 11,000 pages in the main index, and 9000 pages listed as supplemental.

My translated pages gain less juice than any of my English pages, so are more prone to be supplemental.

Tag pages which only contain a single post are generally supplemental, even if they are linked from a piece of content that gained some good linkage both internally and externally.

Translated versions of tag pages that were supplemental, are also supplemental.

So far I haven’t done any optimization on my tag pages to try to make them more “unique”

4.9 > 3.6 ? (Titles > Duplicate Content)

One of the most common things to do with PPC advertising is to use a version of the keywords with and without spaces, especially with only 2 words, or with a website name.

I have done that with tagging for a number of products, and sometimes it has resulted in a good deal more traffic, or traffic when I wouldn’t have seen any traffic at all. On some promotions I am talking an additional 1000+ visitors.

I have mentioned in the past that I rank for WordPress Training with a tag page, actually so does WordPress.com – it isn’t a competitive term, but it only cost me typing one additional tag on a couple of pages.

Double results in the SERPs are often coveted, and these frequently appear when using tag pages, so one listing will be the most specific page on your site, and the second result might be a tag page to all related content.
If I was someone searching, I have a feeling a tag page might get more clicks than if you had a single listing plus a “more results” link – I don’t have any eye-tracking data to prove that.

Tagging and Google Blogsearch

I have seen some strong results in Google Blogsearch for my content, although it is hard to prove whether that is because of tagging specifically, or other ranking factors.

4. PageRank ‘Aiming’

I have blogs that use siloing and minimal crosslinking, and in fact I can just copy what I sent someone in an email a couple of days ago.
The person asking wanted to create WordPress structures similar to the structures described so brilliantly by Michael Campbell, and then in greater detail by Leslie Rohde in Revenge of the Mininet and the Dynamic Linking ebook.

********** email about WordPress Siloing ******************

You can do it with hacking the core files, or creating modified functions in functions.php

The easiest way however is to add nofollow to links generated by various functions

http://guff.szub.net/2005/01/27/add-link-attribute/

and possibly

http://www.sochi-travel.info/articles/wp-nofollow-from-home/

You could also use tagging to channel pagerank around a little, though that ends up slightly different to Leslie’s teachings.

You might also find this useful

http://www.memwg.com/seo-siloing-wordpress-plugin/

You might also want to use one of the many plugins that stick noindex follow or noindex nofollow on all the duplicate content pages.

I actually forgot to mention custom query string in that reply.

If I was using siloing on this blog, and no translation plugin, I would have less than 500 indexed pages.
With tags and translation, currently 11,000 pages in the main index, and 9000 supplemental.

Can a bigger net catch more fish?

Now Google seem to be reporting the supplemental results correctly, I can work on moving more of those pages into the main index.

Milk Bottles & Duplicate Content

For me, one of the most important concepts is that if you are going to have duplicate content pages, they shouldn’t leak Google Juice excessively.

Google themselves say that the reason for supplemental results isn’t duplicate content, but a lack of pagerank. Rank flows from one page to another, it doesn’t dissipate.

The same is also true if you use Dofollow, you should try to maximise your internal linking as much as possible with related links, tags etc to shift a little more of the incoming juice to other pages that might need it.

I see people suggest noindex, follow as being good for tag pages and other duplicate content. If you have external links on those pages, maybe noindex, nofollow would be better – I can’t see any benefit in the follow.

More Google Yoyos

Link attribution for syndicated content is really broken this week, maybe due to recent algorithm changes. As an example I used to have a very solid 3rd and 4th place ranking for “dofollow” – fairly understandable with the amount of links I have on my list of dofollow and nofollow plugins.

For the last week or so 2 articles that link back to my originals syndicated on Webpronews.com have been ranking, and those articles didn’t receive lots of links.

As I have discussed in the past, when discussing blog internal linking, for this blog I am doing “massive ball linking”.

Links come into the blog from various places and to specific content. By using tagging and related posts on each page (maybe a few too many now), whatever pagerank, trust and relevance that a page is given, get passed onto other relevant content.

It also gets passed onto people who leave comments or trackback. When you link to me from your blog posts, the juice flows back – sometimes more, sometimes less, but it is all relevant links – just what the web is all about.

I suppose you could look on this as a “organic garden” approach. Just let things grow wild, and only interfere if something needs drastic change.

I haven’t been overly worried about the multiple forms of duplicate content that are typical on a WordPress blog.

Exactly Why I Don’t Worry About Duplicate Content

First of all I discussed this a little not so long ago, in particular about duplicate content and supplemental results.

Matt Cutts isn’t worried about honest duplicate content

Proof – Matt Really isn’t worried

First of all lets take at look at Matt’s robots.txt file

User-agent: *
Allow:

Then you can look at the metadata on all Matts duplicate content pages

Category archives – I am going to link to his seo glossary, I am sure it doesn’t get many links.
Date Archives
Sequential pages – lets go back in time a few pages

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<title>Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO &raquo; Movies/Videos</title>
<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.0.7" /> <!-- leave this for stats -->
<meta name="robots" content="noodp">

Basically he lets the search engines work out what is going on.

There are simple plugins out there to prevent these pages being indexed and followed in various ways, but Matt Cutts doesn’t worry about it.

The Wayback Machine

Yep, more duplicate content – Matt doesn’t block them

Matt Doesn’t even block the login page to his WordPress installation – that same page appears over 2 million times on the web.

Let it Flow

OMG I am wasting all that Google Juice that I worked so hard for!

Or maybe not…

Google Juice is liquid… it flows, it you give it a direction to flow in.

Whilst you may give a page with duplicate content some juice, that juice flows back out to other pages. Just because that page might end up in the supplemental results, doesn’t mean the Google juice is being wasted.

Some blog designs unfortunately place too much emphasis on the most current content. They don’t use tags, their date archives are accessed by a silly calendar widget on the front page, and they don’t have any other routes for pagerank to flow.

Structured Linking

It is possible to use only a very structured linking system for a blog, but it is important to think about relevance. In Revenge of the Mininet there are some great linking structures defined. They would be ideal for highly “niched” sites.

Many blogs, including this one, cover a wide multitude of subjects. A carefully constructed linking structure would be much harder to define and you might lose the benefit of giving relevance to specific pages.

Structured Relevance?

Some duplicate content pages give great, maybe even enhanced relevance to content.
Date archives in many blog designs are not very helpful. If date archives and previous pages are used as the primary navigation to previous content, and path for search engines to take, you really aren’t giving your content any justice or longevity.

Content Longevity

Lets look at some of my internal pages for longevity

How a Blogroll can kill your Pagerank – 2 month old post, linked to a few times in posts, but it appears a lot on pages due to tagging and using related posts – currently PR4

NoFollow and Pink Boxes – also PR4

Some posts on UTW Tips – both PR3

Ultimate Tag Warrior SEO Tricks (pt 1)
UTW – Tagging SEO Tricks (pt 2)

From browsing around, I have discovered that the Google Toolbar Pagerank isn’t completely comprehensive, as I have posts that should have PR4 that don’t. One of them was my highest ranking page in November and December.

It was hard to find a post that hadn’t been later referred to in a more recent post but this is a good example:-

No NoFollow & No-Nofollow.com

That post is again PR3, and didn’t receive any specific direct love from outside links or internal links in posts. It did benefit from tagging, and related posts.

This time around I didn’t tag and categorize my old content from my blogspot domain. Almost all of that content didn’t receive much pagerank love unless it had been linked to directly.
I am going to see if for the next update it can be revitalized.

How much of your old content retains visible pagerank?

It is actually still difficult to compare, because so many pages still haven’t received pagerank they probably deserve. Even Matt has some pages that are linked to from PR6 categories that show a toolbar pagerank of zero such as http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/starving-to-death-review/

I would link to it directly with a live link, but I don’t want to ruin the example

For one of Matts posts that one probably received a lot less inbound links

Yes that is a Yahoo link – wouldn’t it be nice to have a “-all” flag on Google searches to list everything below Google’s threshold as well, even if it is just an aid for webmasters to find splogs.

Conclusion

Matt is a busy man, maybe he hasn’t had time to optimize and avoid all these duplicate content issues but I really believe it is nothing to worry about, and Matt might just be demonstrating this with his own blog.

You can aim for a more focused structure on a blog, using various forms of dynamic linking but it is not something easy to achieve yet with any platform.

Bookmark or Subscribe to this post

Download Revenge of the Mininet for free (It is honestly worth signing up to Michaels list)

Read Revenge of the Mininet

Log into the Leslie Rohde Dynamic Linking Bonus (for some reason the site asks for the password twice, you didn’t make a mistake, just use the username and password twice)
Read Dynamic Linking through at least twice

Come back to reading this post…

Stop Reading if you haven’t done all of the above!

So a blog is generally a ball linking structure. (if you read the books you would know about this term)
But lets think about other sites, and how you can cheat a little when using 3rd party articles (duplicate content).

Using 3rd party articles, you are forced to have an external link.

There are 2 ways of doing this, and it is not really discussed in either ebook.

1. Limit the amount of PR that is given to the pages, thus you might have the link to the articles sitemap on your main sitemap.

This strategy is ok if you mainly want the articles to sacrifice PR, but they still have quite a PR leak.

2. Use ball linking from any 3rd party article page, minimising the value of any external link from the page

Thus have lots of links to related content that doesn’t have PR leaks, minimising the amount of PR that is “wasted”.

Apply it back to blogs

If you use “no follow” for all your comments (or not allow comments), and “no follow” on all external links, then you can do some great optimization, but would probably be unpopular. It would still be quite complicated to achieve various “spider” or “pyramid” solutions.
If you use “no follow” in comments, and not for external links, and optimize your site carefully, you might end up giving too much PR away to the other site.

If you don’t use “no follow” at all, that is a lot of leaks. PR however flows equally, thus if a page has a lot of comments on it, and has a lot of links, you need to have as many leaks to your own pages as possible. It is better to give PR to pages without too many leaks.

Even using a Blog as a CMS with no comments – you are going to need at the very least lots of special custom templates.

Short term solution

Popular blogs are better off having at least a partial ball structure, with so many internal links on a page that it doesn’t matter about the external links.

Think about your average number of comments and external links per post. Then decide how much PR you want to give away. If you have 10 external links on your page and want to give away only 10% of the page PR to them, you need to have 100 internal links of your own on the page.
Tagging and categories can help a lot if used correctly. Blogrolls on every page can be extremely bad. It is much better to “share the juice” by posting about your friends from an SEO point of view, than having them on your sitewide blogroll all the time.

The implementations for widgets for any theme I have seen so far really don’t help you very much.
PLR (private label rights) is the best content for sacrificial mininet sites, as it is easy to sacrifice with no 3rd party outbound links.

Post your most important content as pages rather than posts using modified templates.

Long term solution

;)

Update August 2010

For the last year Google have been suggesting PageRank evaporates from Nofollow links – so you will just have to use javascript, or test what Google claim.