Link equity

[Brian Turner]

We haven't discussed link equity* much, probably because it tends to be a more advanced topic, so I'll open up:

1. Every website carries a certain amount of link juice - link equity

2. This link juice can be channelled very effectively across a site's pages to help them rank better through good on-page link architecture

3. This link juice can be blocked from useless channels, such as for duplicate content and low-value content, by use of robots.txt

4. The more effectively you channel your link equity, the more effectively you can help improve the rank of your target pages


For example, something I've been doing tonight is to visit my main vbulletin forums, and block the following from being indexed via robots.txt:

- memberlist
- general chat, introductions, & similar low signal boards

I've also visited some of the more important news sites I run and blocked the Wordpress date archives from being indexed with robots.txt


The aim overall here is to block link equity from flowing into duplicate and low value content - thus helping to pool it in the more important high signal/value pages

Something else I could have done is to block images being spidered - but as my sites are information sites, Google Images can bring in useful attention, so I'm not planning to block that off - though it remains a potentially useful option for other sites.


ADDED: * years ago we'd probably say "PageRank" instead of Link Equity - however, as there is no longer any reliable or useful source for PageRank value, plus the fact that the usefulness of PageRank for ranking purposes is questionable at best, means link equity makes for a better title.

However, anyone referencing tutorials on chanelling PageRank from years ago will find the terms relatively interchangeable.

[Joff]

Some good theory! Any chance of a robots.txt snippet?

[tamecrow]

This is something I've been doing on a lot of websites recently too.

Brian - FYI, blocking files in robots.txt doesn't stop PageRank/link equity passing to the target pages. The only way to ensure this is using nofollow attributes on the links. Robots.txt only stops the pages being crawled or indexed and link equity will still leak to the pages.

[Brian Turner]

Yep, sorry, I should have mentioned nofollow as well as part of the process.

The reason I'm using robots.txt for blocking forum access is because I want to focus link equity and spidering activity in higher signal areas.

Another point I maybe didn't make well is that if you have a site with a large number of pages, by cutting out the lower signal stuff, you focus the indexing and link equity into your higher signal pages which you want to leverage to bring in the visitors anyway.

So it's a case of trying to focus search engine's attention on your higher quality content.

There are other ways as well, such as a few different strategies for internal architecture - hub and spoke comes to attention, which is partly achieved by listing popular pages on Wordpress installs I run as can be seen on the Platinax blog here:
http://www.platinax.co.uk/blog/126-7...tter-indexing/

[Joff]

Since following Brian's advice in his blog, I've now got Firefox highlighting all the nofollows and it's interesting to see how seemingly random sites I visit are using nofollows.

[Brian Turner]

What's especially interesting is to see how different software formats apply it by default - such as vbulletin and Wordpress - but additionally how some sites try to use it to channel PR, and some simply use it to prevent any external site getting link juice.

[Spiderden]

Originally Posted by Brian Turner

For example, something I've been doing tonight is to visit my main vbulletin forums, and block the following from being indexed via robots.txt:

- memberlist
- general chat, introductions, & similar low signal boards

For those of you with vB forums, you may find this list useful.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /forums/ajax.php
Disallow: /forums/attachment.php
Disallow: /forums/cron.php
Disallow: /forums/editpost.php
Disallow: /forums/global.php
Disallow: /forums/image.php
Disallow: /forums/inlinemod.php
Disallow: /forums/joinrequests.php
Disallow: /forums/login.php
Disallow: /forums/member.php
Disallow: /forums/misc.php
Disallow: /forums/moderator.php
Disallow: /forums/newattachment.php
Disallow: /forums/newreply.php
Disallow: /forums/newthread.php
Disallow: /forums/online.php
Disallow: /forums/poll.php
Disallow: /forums/postings.php
Disallow: /forums/printthread.php
Disallow: /forums/private.php
Disallow: /forums/profile.php
Disallow: /forums/register.php
Disallow: /forums/report.php
Disallow: /forums/reputation.php
Disallow: /forums/search.php
Disallow: /forums/sendmessage.php
Disallow: /forums/subscription.php
Disallow: /forums/threadrate.php
Disallow: /forums/usercp.php
Disallow: /forums/usernote.php

[Brian Turner]

It's a good list - thanks for that.

Just gets complicated when you've rewritten your forums.