An Experminent In Page Rank Sculpting…
September 27, 2011 by David Olsen · Leave a Comment
I’ve been a fan of Leslie Rohde (LR) for some several years now. Leslie is the guy who coined the term “Link Reputation” back in 2002 to describe how Google ranks sites. Anyway, in his free ebook Dynamic Linking Leslie outlines a number of ways to sculpt internal pagerank. Here’s an experiment I’m doing with one of my sites…
First what is Page Rank Sculpting?
Page Rank Sculpting is the art of controlling how you link to your sites pages. The idea is to maximize the impact that your links have. Keep in mind, in this scenario, the links I’m talking are NOT backlinks (Links form other sites), the links we’re discussing here are essentially your sites internal navigation. When done properly, dynamic linking can greatly increase your websites presence with Google.
Mistakes of the past…
Until a few years ago, Pagerank sculpting could be handled by strategically using the “No-Follow” tag. However, Google began handling this tag differently around 2008, making it an infective tool to for sculpting. Today, sculpting needs to be handled with the proper use of links. I will point out that in his ebook, LR outlines several methods for hiding your links from Google, however in this experiment, I”m not using any of them -at least not yet.
Anyway, on to my site…
Phase 1
I have a niche domain that I purchased several years ago but never did anything with. The site is Number Charms, earlier this year, I did a little keyword research and found six phrases that I would target. Starting off the site had only these six articles in. The initial phrases I was targeting were:
- Number Charms (a page that acts as the home page)
- Gold Number Charms
- Silver Number Charms
- Sterling Silver Number Charms
- Sports Number Charms
- Brass Number Charms
Navigation
Originally, I removed all built-in theme navigation and instead created a text widget that linked to all six pages. I put this widget in the sidebar on every page.
For backlinks, I used some old articles I had written and submitted them to Ezinearticles.com. None of the articles I used were related to the niche in anyway, I simply submitted them and pointed links in the resources box to my site.
I quickly started ranking for most of my key phrases – this sounds more impressive than it actually is as it’s a pretty small niche. None the less, I was happy with my results.
After a few months, my sites homepage was a Pr3.
Phase 2
After my initial “success”, my rankings slowly started to fall off. Makes sense, Google is said to like “living” sites, this site was pretty much static after my initial flurry of activity when I set it up. I decided to continue on with the experiment and delve a bit deep into sculpting.
More Keyword Research…
I used my trusty copy of Micro Niche Finder and found several hundred decent terms related to my initial seed niche (number charms). I narrowed the list down to the top 10 phrases (I used Micro Niche Finders built in ratings tools for this). I had ten new articles written (one for each of my new phrases).
While the new articles were being written, I made some structural changes to the site itself. I broke the site down into categories and removed the text widget navigation that I had been using. For the new nagivation, I chose to add links to each of my (now eight) categories on the home page then each of the categories simply link back to home.
One of my categories has six separate sub pages (See that here:) Customized Charm Bracelets. On this “category page”, I linked to all my sub pages. Each sub page links back to the category page – the category page also links back to the home page.
Here’s a simple graphic showing what the new linking structure looks like…
The idea here is that I’m controlling where my page rank goes. I want my home page to get the most link juice, so all categories pages link back to the home page. My sub pages (under the categories) link back to only their parent category. I also removed any extraneous links (ie: the typical homepage link in the header, etc).Keep watching, I’ll update as new results come in…
