Link Structure within and PR

my question is the link structure within my sites pertaining to the links page.

My site had a link to my links page on every page within my site. Does this dilute the PR?

Sence i was already thinking it does i have removed all links to the links page except for one link located on the home page.

is this correct in thinking this?

i have two sites so far and my new one just got a PR5 on the home page and PR4 on all other pages. my old site which i just redisgned already has a PR4.

I believe that the PR4 pages on the new site are inheriting the page rank from the home page PR5. Does anyone know if the internal pages of a site can eventually be greater than the home page?

I have a sneaky feeling that ony the page rank of the home page is calculated by backward links (due to; 1. The fact that most sites have the majority of backward links to the home page, both from within the site and from other sites, and 2. That even with an architecture consisting of thousands of PC's the overhead of calculating individual page ranks for every page crawled would be beyond even Google's computational abilities.) and every other page on a site inherits its rank using a relatively simple algorithm based on relative distance (in terms of links and directories) from the home page.

Clarification would be greatly appreciated. If I am in fact espousing complete twaddle I will bow to superior knowledge and apologise profusely.

Oh and in response to the post above I don't think that having the link on every page will significantly reduce the PR of other pages within the site for reasons mentioned above.

On the contrary, this is what helps Google to see the home page as the most important page on your site. It's also good user design.

I am impressed that Google manages to sort out my site as well as it does. The site has about 7,500 pages, with the home page being ranked as PR6. All the most important "category pages" that lead from the home page to other pages within the site have rankings of PR5, while minor category pages are ranked PR4. The product pages, from which actual products are sold, are mostly ranked PR3.

You should worry about good navigation and good user design. Optimize the structure of your site for users, not for search engines. Google will get it right.

I believe this could only happen if, for some reason, there are a lot of external links on other servers to an internal page. Google does seem to be good at figuring out which page on a site is the most important page.

Where Google can trip up, however, is that it can now be fooled to think that another URL is your home page. Google in its present build can interpret any URL that redirects to a particular page as being the URL of the page itself. See the topic I started here, "Can Google links be hijacked?" See also the discussion, "Commission Junction and Google."

Must say that I agree with Howard with regard to the philosophy of website design. Make using the site the best possible experience for the user that you can using visual design, navigation design and well wriiten copy.

Make the site as search engine friendly as you can using good HTML. Proper use of page titles, <h?> tags, alt and title attributes, sensible session management and target key phrases in the content as well as a sensible structured layout of the content.

Get both right and your halfway there to a successful balanced site in terms of users and search engines. If your site is a useful resource then the links will come, but it never hurts to help them along by ensuring that to add your site to directories etc. where you can.

All the above is true

But the lesser pages on complex sites will always eventually be more important than the home page (in google terms) because of the difficulty of keeping keyword density and relevant text on the home page.

If you use Wordtracker you will soon come round to the fact that you need to have a page specifically for a keyword phrase - that page becomes your "home page" - the entry into your site - and therefore you need to make sure that it looks good and provides what the person is looking for.

What does become tricky is when google finds an obscure page deep within the directories that, for instance, is part of a Frameset and on its own does not mean much (you can of course block these but I don't working on the principle that I am not Google) so you need to be on the lookout for these and then put in a js that forces the Frameset to load

Interesting thread. Mind if I jump in with an addition.

Site design is inherently a compromise between 3 factors:

1. Usability (your guests) - Dito to Howards thoughts in spades

2. Your ability to monetize the site

3. And of course SEO

Natch, we could debate the order of these issues but IMHO you need all three. For example:

Site A loads fast, has an easy to understand/use navigation, a very high usability factor, and is also optamized for SE. Unfortunetly, the design does not accomadate banners and text adverts above the fold and or below the fold. Given the various IAB sizes that are currently available including new ones and dynamic text adverts, I respectfully submit that the site is built wrong. A lesson I learned the hard way years ago and one which still needs work

If you read my post in this forum http://www.seochat.com/viewtopic.php?t=658

you will see my responce to links pages