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pass page rank

Pierre Kleinhans [PersonRank 1]

Friday, October 3, 2008
15 years ago7,045 views

I am new to this stuff, so please be so kind to help. "Pass page rank" – What do these three words mean in relation to marketing your web site?
Does this mean we are not allowed to submit our web site to paid directories like Yahoo etc. that have top page rank, but online to paid directories that have a page rank that is inferior to your own??

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

Submit your web site only to places where you do it for human visitors. Don't worry about submitting to directories to improve your ranking (if you do want to submit, you might consider Yahoo and DMOZ.org only). Rather, build up your site and content and add great stuff and then tell people about it. Don't worry about the PageRank of the site where you submit something to, whether it be higher or lower than yours. Over time, PageRank usually comes naturally, as a symptom of your great content. Of course, that's just subjective advice.

As far as the phrase "pass PageRank" goes, a site A linking to site B "passes" PageRank (PR) to B, at least usually (there are cases in which Google disables the PR-passing ability of a site even when it keeps the displayed PR intact). Think of it as if a customer says something good about your company to another customer – they "pass trust" by referring to your company, and thus the other customer is more likely to end up with your company's services... similarly, links pointing from site A to B are like a mention that passes trust.

You can also say that you "pass PageRank" when you link to your own sub-pages from e.g. the front-page of your site; to some degree, you can decide where you want to pass your PR to your internal pages, e.g. you could link to the 10 most important pages, or link to 100 but know that it would be split to a smaller "PR-passing" and so on. But again this should come natural without thinking about PR too much but just thinking about which linking structure makes the most sense for your human visitors.

beussery [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

In addition to Philipp's post, I wanted to add:

Paid links (buying and or selling links) passing PageRank are a violation of Google Webmaster Guidelines. If you buy links to market your site, that is fine as long as those links use "nofollow" attributes.

Pierre Kleinhans [PersonRank 1]

15 years ago #

Thanks very much for this, we have been getting such conflicting advice from people out there selling their advice professionally, and yet we can get penalised by the search engines for implementing the advice of these professionals... We are an honest start up business investing millions and building great content. I will make sure to go to any sites we have paid to list and ensure there are no follows on the links and if not request that they insert those immediately or remove our listing.

Another question: if an affiliate implements a widget in the underlying link on the widget must it be no follow. The integration is free, but there is obviously a commercial benefit for the affiliate. It is more complicated because some people can implement our widget but we will not approve them as an affiliate if they are too small (which means it is non commercial), while others will be commercial. Also implementing the widget is a clear recognition of the value of our content.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

> Another question: if an affiliate implements a widget in
> the underlying link on the widget must it be no follow.

Pierre, non-nofollowed widget backlinks are a bit of a gray area. Matt Cutts once talked about it in this Q&A:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5725413130407531172

I wrapped it up as this:
<<“Widgetbait”, like web counters which are distributed with a link included. Google looks at different parameters to decide what is blackhat, like checking how on-topic the target page and anchor text are. Say you have an Ubuntu release countdown widget and the backlink on the widget goes to Ubuntu.com, then it may be OK... whereas if you have a countdown widget and the link goes to an unrelated “debt consolidation" type of page (or worse, the link is hidden), it may not be OK.>>
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-07-08-n14.html

Pierre Kleinhans [PersonRank 1]

15 years ago #

Thanks again Philipp. I listened to Matt Cutts speaking on the Q&A and it seemed he was only worried about non related widgets going to spammy pages, and or with the unrelated target link hidden.

In our case it is a widget that lets you search for a service in a location. This then takes you to our page for that type of service in that location. You can and should use the widget to find any one of hundreds of relevant pages. To identify ourselves to the search engines the widget contains a link to our home page in the Java script container div. The link will display if the widget is slow to display. The link will actually say: find these sorts of services on thissite.com. We cannot put that link on top of the widget because it would defeat the whole functionality.

The purpose of the widget is to drive traffic, and not to impress search engines, however we would be amiss if we did not use the opportunity to let the search engines know we are there. The links are not no-follow.

Therefor, finally, in your opinion, are we OK to think that that is OK?.

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