19. A few Linking Considerations

In this chapter I want to look at how you should be linking all the different pages of your site together.

19.1. Types of links

There are basically two types of text links you can use on your site to link pages together. One is the "standard" HTML link you are already familiar with, and the other is something called a dynamic link.

The Standard link can be seen and followed by visitors and search engine spiders. Dynamic links can be seen and followed by visitors, but they are not followed by spiders.

What this means is that:

search engines spiders will not find pages that you link to dynamically

Page Rank is not passed onto the pages you link to using dynamic links

Pages that are only linked to dynamically will not be found in the search engine results.

So, to summarise, dynamic links hide certain pages from the search engines, but not from your visitors.

Why is this useful? Well, look back when we discussed Page Rank.

Imagine a PR6 page with three standard links on it.

Link 1 is a link to a sales page on your site.

Link 2 is a link to your disclaimer

Link 3 is a link to your privacy page

How much PR does your sales page end up with?

Well, the linking page sends a proportion of its PR6 to three pages, so each will end up with around a PR2 boost.

What use is this PR2 on a disclaimer or privacy page?

Answer, none whatsoever. In fact it is a huge waste.

OK, imagine the same webpage with three links, but instead of standard links, lets make the links to the disclaimer and privacy pages dynamic.

Now how much PR has the sales page now got?

Well, the PR of the linking page is no longer shared between the three pages. It is only directed down standard text links, so the full PR 6 is passed onto the sales page (actually it is a little less than this as there is a dampening factor involved, but you get the point).

The moral of this story is that you need to think about linking. Don’t link to unimportant pages using standard links, use dynamic instead.

In 2005, Google, MSN and Yahoo all agreed on a form of dynamic linking that they would respect. It was introduced so that blog authors could prevent blog link spam (where spammers post comments just to get a link back to their site). By forcing blog comments to use dynamic linking, blog spammers received no benefit from their efforts.

The form of dynamic linking that the search engines agreed to uses the "no follow" tag, and it is very easy to use.

You just insert

rel = "nofollow"

into your link HTML.

This will make the link dynamic, and search engines will ignore the link, and not pass PR onto the page referenced in the link.

If I give a code example here, then it is likely to get garbled when I send the newsletter out (as all links are encrypted, allowing me to see how many people click each link). So, to read more, and to see exactly what these nofollow links look like, read this article at search engine watch.

As you can see, dynamic linking is very easy to do, and used properly, it can prevent PR being sent to unimportant pages on your site like disclaimer, privacy etc.

OK, with that covered, lets consider the bigger picture of linking your pages together.

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