Construction Contractors Community

WFCseoGuru

Internal link structure or often referred to as IA (internal architecture), is different for every site. The way it works is based on several objectives. One is to make sure every page of your site is two clicks or less away from your home page. If you click five times from your home page just to get to a page, chances are that page will never rank highly in the SERPs.

Contractor's web sites are actually very simple in terms of IA. But in the same respect, play a larger role in how pages rank. To get started right, you should know that Google passes rank from one page to another inside of your site based on a mathmatical formula. Take a look:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

Note that the PageRanks form a probability distribution over web pages, so the sum of all web pages' PageRanks will be one.

PageRank or PR(A) can be calculated using a simple iterative algorithm, and corresponds to the principal eigenvector of the normalized link matrix of the web.

But that’s not too helpful so let’s break it down into sections.

PR(Tn) - Each page has a notion of its own self-importance. That’s “PR(T1)” for the first page in the web all the way up to “PR(Tn)” for the last page

C(Tn) - Each page spreads its vote out evenly amongst all of it’s outgoing links. The count, or number, of outgoing links for page 1 is “C(T1)”, “C(Tn)” for page n, and so on for all pages.

PR(Tn)/C(Tn) - so if our page (page A) has a backlink from page “n” the share of the vote page A will get is “PR(Tn)/C(Tn)”
d(... - All these fractions of votes are added together but, to stop the other pages having too much influence, this total vote is “damped down” by multiplying it by 0.85 (the factor “d”)

(1 - d) - The (1 – d) bit at the beginning is a bit of probability math magic so the “sum of all web pages' PageRanks will be one”: it adds in the bit lost by the d(.... It also means that if a page has no links to it (no backlinks) even then it will still get a small PR of 0.15 (i.e. 1 – 0.85).

(Aside: the Google paper says “the sum of all pages” but they mean the “the normalised sum” – otherwise known as “the average” to you and me.

So is this enough to get you confused. I thought so. Let me put this in plain english. Link every page to every page that counts and add nofollow tags to page links that don't add value to your site like privacy pages and copywrite pages. If you have a page that was not meant to rank high, nofollow the link. Just make sure you link to the page from your sitemap without the nofollow tag and that will be good enough.