Full Path in Links or <BASE>? 1

[RISTMO]

Hi,
Which one of these is the best way to link, or does it not matter?
1. <a href=&quot;

http://.www.ristmo.com/&quot;>RISTMO

Designs</a>
2. <a href=&quot;/&quot;>RISTMO Designs</a> and have this in the head: <base href=&quot;

http://www.ristmo.com/&quot;>

A site I'm making is going to have over 500 internal links per page, and so it would load a lot faster without the &quot;

http://www.ristmo.com/&quot;,

but I don't want to hurt my search engine ranking in any way.

Rick

-----------------------------------------------------------

http://www.ristmo.com/

RISTMO Designs

http://www.arabchurch.com/

Arab Church

http://www.reference-guides.com/

Reference Guides

 

[ChrisHirst]

Hi Rick,

The only URL that should be an absolute (href=&quot;

http://www.mydomain.com&quot;)

is any link back to your home page and have the anchor text as your main keyphrase, all internal navigation references can be relative ( href=&quot;contact.htm&quot; ). So 1 would be the answer.

500 internal links per page will be of no use to either visitors or spiders, From the visitor point of view I would think it would be pretty confusing (and start to look like a link farm) and from the spiders 400 of them may will be ignored, Google Webmaster Guidelines (

http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html)

says

Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?

 

[RISTMO]

As to the number of links, for one of my sites, I have sheet music for 800 songs from a book. I was planning to have 800 links by number, so it would make perfect sense to the user--click the number of the song to get the sheet music for that number. What I was concerned about was Google. From what I understood, it was outbound links that were to be kept to a minimum. I thought that internal links only &quot;distributed&quot; the PR and so linking to each page only made sure that each had equal weight?

But I've seen some sites (more than one, but I can't think of any urls right now...) that have only backwards link from a different site (with a pr of 4-5) and they have a PR of 5. If you look at their backwards links, though, they have 50 or their own pages showing up (practically ever page on their website). So I would assume that it was those links that helped boost their pr up to 5. I remember that they had the full path to the page displaying in the status bar when I hovered over their links, that's why I was wondering if they used <base> or typed it manually (I forgot to check the source code). I'm assuming that it was their method of internal linking that got them a PR of 5, because 1 link from a different site with a PR of 4-5 certainly wouldn't seem to be enough to bump a site up that high.

Rick

-----------------------------------------------------------

http://www.ristmo.com/

RISTMO Designs

http://www.arabchurch.com/

Arab Church

http://www.reference-guides.com/

Reference Guides

 

[ChrisHirst]

THe full path will always show in the status bar, it's a function of the browser to add the FQDN to links without http:// at the start. If you put href=&quot;

http://www.mydomain.com/pagename&quot;

you'll find the status bar will show (and the browser try to resolve)

http://www.mydomain.com/www.mydomain.com/pagename.

If you think about it, any link from a page is outbound from that page, so while as you say internal links do distribute the PR around the site, it also does the same for external links.

say a page with PR1 has 100 links, each of those links will carry PR1/100 as a 'vote' for the linked page\site. If the same PR1 page only has 10 links then each link carries PR1/10 so it makes sense to have more pages with less links if you are concerned about PR.







Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?

 

[RISTMO]

So what you seem to be saying is that if I had 800 links and a PR of 6, each link would be giving out 6/800 PR....X 800 links, and each page is being given a PR of 8 in the end. But....if I were to set it up to only display 100 links per page, generated on the fly to be links to the next 100 songs from the number displaying, each page would be given a PR of 6/100 X 100 links....which is still a PR of 6. So although this is less user friendly, it's better for Google? But then what about some of the 10 page websites out there where there's a link to all 10 pages from each of the 10 pages? The homepage has a PR of 4, so each page should have a PR of 4/10 times 10, but some of the pages only have a PR of 3?

Rick

-----------------------------------------------------------

http://www.ristmo.com/

RISTMO Designs

http://www.arabchurch.com/

Arab Church

 

[RISTMO]

Actually, I just realized...the answer to my question (and the same one you supplied, Chris) is on this site I'd been linking to in my sig --

http://www.reference-guides.com/.

On its internal links, it just has a relative url--it doesn't even spell out the whole thing for the homepage!...But it has a good ranking and displays 268 backwards links, a good 75 of them being from its own site. It would seem then that I don't even have to include a <base href=&quot;

http://www.mydomain.com/&quot;>

(even though I don't see why it would hurt), I can just link to the pages relatively.

But, something else I noticed is that this site has 75 links on the menu to other pages on the same site and one the homepage, it has another 77 links to other sites (+ those 60 image links at the top!), and it seems to rank just fine. I have always been told that linking internally is just fine, but linking to other sites reduces your PR. Are they saying then that the site would have a PR of 6 if it didn't link to those other sites? But this site seems to break the 100 links rule, and it's doing just fine. Does that mean that it was just a suggestion by Google or is it really important?

Rick

-----------------------------------------------------------

http://www.ristmo.com/

RISTMO Designs

http://www.arabchurch.com/

Arab Church

 

[ChrisHirst]

The c**p about linking out reducing PR is just that. You don't 'give away' your PR (If that happened nobody would link to anybody) all you are doing is giving a 'vote' (PR/Links weight) for another site. The only thing that could hurt your PR is linking to a 'bad area' (link farm/FFA page) because if that gets penalised the 'upstream' pages can and do get pulled into the penalty as well.
PR is far more complex than 1 to 10. The actual number is not an integer between 1 and 10 but a much larger real value (or smaller depending on the math), but 1 to 10 is an approximation (very) for the toolbar, and a PR4 means between whatever indicates 3.5 and 4.49. It seems to be a logarithmic scale so a 4 to 5 raise is 1000 times more difficult to reach than a 3 to 4 raise and so on.

ok, on reference-guides the internal PR is distributed because google has 27,800 internal pages indexed.

http://www.google.com/search?q=alli...F-8&oe=UTF-8&c2coff=1&start=180&sa=N&filter=0

which would seem to refute the 100 link/page, but as with all things Google the information they release is mainly suggestions rather than absolutes.
The homepage will always have a higher PR than internal pages as invariably external links will point to it, That's why internal links to the home page should be to the domain and not relative, as the relative link can be seen as a different URL and is then given two PR weightings one from external links and one from internal, and internal page links do not seem to correspond exactly to the PR/links but are weighted slightly lower.

btw. None of this info is cast in stone. It's based on observation and some small scale experimentation.

Some Reading material:
The original paper on Google,
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

http://www7.scu.edu.au/programme/fullpapers/1921/com1921.htm

and of course this (how PR works)
thread828-502651



Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?

 

[RISTMO]

Don't know if you noticed, but I replied to that thread a few months ago....&quot;RISTMO (Programmer) Mar 23, 2003
Thank you sooooo much!!! I finaly understand how that works!!!

Rick
&quot;....Looks like I must not have :-/ ;-).

I know what you mean about the PR being on a completely different scale--I was only using numbers from 1-10 for simplicity's sake, since none of us really know how high the highest &quot;real&quot; PR is.

But about what you were saying with the linking....you're saying that I could link to 100 external sites and it wouldn't affect my PR in the least (as long as the sites being linked to were good)? Lots of people who call themselves SEO's, but I guess in reality, I guess don't have to know that much, say that it's hard for a directory to rank well because it has all the outbound links and often those sites don't link back. I always accepted this fact as true (although I sometimes wondered why), since it fits in with the idea that outbound links lower your PR, but if the outbound links don't lower your PR, then that would be wrong, too? This is just very strange to hear someone say that outbound links don't lower your PR. I thought it was more along the lines of &quot;outbound links give out PR, internal links distribute it&quot; (and I'm sure that's a quote, probably from someone on TT, I just don't remember who or where). This is all wrong, then?

And about the allinurl search thing you showed me. What do those numbers really mean? Do they mean that each one of those pages that shows up in the allinurl search are indexed and ready to be listed in Google for the next search that matches the keywords of that page? Do the links from each of those pages count towards increasing your PR? (I would think yes) Ah, but that makes me remember....if there was no penalty against a page linking to another page, if there was a page with 100 links and each of those pages being linked to each had those same hundred links and a link back to the home page, what would stop the PR from increasing indefinately? Assuming each page initially had a PR of 4 (simple number), each of the 100 pages would give out 4/100 of a PR to each of the other pages. So each page would end up receiving an additional 400/100 = PR of 4. I'm going to make the wild guess that a *simple* PR of 4 is really a PR of 3000. I know that's way off (although I don't know in which direction....), but say then that that was the *real* PR. We then double that to account for the additional *simple* PR of 4 being added to it. Now, the real PR should be 6000. I really don't have a clue about what *real* PR is needed to make the *simple* PR shown in the toolbar go up a notch, but it doesn't really matter--either way, each page is worth more now, so in theory, since they all gained PR and none lost, they all have a higher PR than before, so they will go around again distributing PR. This time each page gets 100 links each distributing a PR of 4+x/100 = a PR of 4+x. Now that could be a 4.5 (*simple*) or it could be a 6 (*simple*), it doesn't really matter--either way, our site has fallen into a repeating cycle where each time, its PR rises. It will eventually peak out in simple numbers with a PR of ten--just from the 100 links it originally started with (!!!), unless either I'm missing something in my logic, or there is a penalty to a page's PR to counteract the links that page contains.

What does this all mean?

I know this post might be a little long, but things just don't make sense to me, and I don't think it's anything terribly difficult.

Thanks everyone (Chris ),
Rick

-----------------------------------------------------------

http://www.ristmo.com/

RISTMO Designs

http://www.arabchurch.com/

Arab Church

 

[ChrisHirst]

I did notice you read it, I included the reference really for anyone else reading this thread (just in case somebody searches the forum. Yeah right!)

yep outbound links do give out PR, but do not give away PR.

What limits PR is the damping factor (d in the matrix calc) which is normally set to .85 and the number of pages in the site, so 100 PR4 links in an internal crosslink of 100 pages would not give every page PR4.
WebWorkshop have a PR calculator (

http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank_calculator.php3)

which may help to clarify it (or not LOL). There are discussions at WMW that get close to coming to blows over PR!
Some directories can and do get good PR, most ODP pages are PR5 to PR7 they get that by keeping categories and entry descriptions fairly relevant to each other. A new and well designed directory

http://www.websavvy.cc

has only been up a few months and has PR4 & PR3.

The allinurl: search shows all the pages that Google knows about for that URL (not just the >PR4 ones) and each of those adds to the PR. There are a lot more search tools at Google than the link: and site: ones, and yes anyone of those pages can be brought up for any search that can be related to that page.
This is why I don't stress or really care about PR, It really is one minor part of a complex algo to get the pages relevant to the search term.
One of the sites I look after is PR2 (home) PR1 (internal) and gets page 1 results for around 30 search phrases with different pages being relevant, another is fairly new (no PR yet) and again gets page 1 or 2 results for the phrases each indexed page is optimised for.




Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?

 

[RISTMO]

That calculator page looks like just what I've been looking for....if only I could make sense of it! :-S .

I think I learned what I wanted to learn from this (although I couldn't explain what that is), and I very much appreciate your time and effort.

Thanks!

Rick

-----------------------------------------------------------

http://www.ristmo.com/

RISTMO Designs

http://www.arabchurch.com/

Arab Church