Is Link Consolidation An Improvement?
In June, Google’s Matt Cutts announced that PageRank sculpting would be affected by a change in the search engine’s nofollow policy. It wasn’t really a change; it really an enforcement issue. But it got a bunch of SEOs to thinking, scheming, and dreaming. Evidently, Rand Fishkin was one of them.
The gold-old Rand came up with an alternative to PageRank sculpting and he’s calling it “Link Consolidation.” It works like this:
- You take several pages that are somewhat related, but not identical (such as About, Press, Contact, etc.), and you turn them all into one page instead of giving each its own unique page
- Assign each section of your page a bookmark, designated by #
- Point your internal links that before would have been pointed to those individual pages and point them instead of the appropriate bookmark on your consolidated page
The effect would be something like this:
- All of your consolidated pages are now at /about.html
- press.html redirects to /about.html#press
- contact.html redirects to /about.html#contact
- privacy.html redirects to /about.html#privacy
- /about.html still points to /about.html or can redirect to /about.html#about
Outside links that point to this page will likely link to /about.html, but your internal links can point to any of the bookmarks on that page or the top of the page and the links will all be counted for /about.html. The effect is that you’ll have more links overall pointing to a single page, but you’ll have fewer pages on your website, appearing as if PageRank sculpting really was still working.
I’m skeptical. Here’s why:
Fewer pages means fewer ways to rank at the search engines. It could water down your SEO for the /about.html page.
While all of those links pointing to about.html could increase your PageRank for that page, causing it to rank higher in the search engines and be found by more people, if you have a lot of information on that page that isn’t relevant to a large portion of the people who find it in the search engines then it could diminish user experience.
Keep in mind that if you have fewer than 100,000 pages on your site then this entire discussion is moot. PageRank sculpting shouldn’t be something you should be concerned about anyway. But if you do have that many pages on your website, I’m reasonably sure there are a million other things that could occupy your time and attention.
6 Responses to “Is Link Consolidation An Improvement?”
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The original argument in favor of these amateurish attempts to alter the flow of PageRank through sites was that pages like “About Us”, “Terms of Service”, “Contact Us”, etc. are not important enough to warrant all the PageRank they attract. The SEOs who made this foolish argument should have been ostracized because clearly they were not paying attention to the fact that people actually search for these kinds of pages.
They ARE important — but more importantly, if they are accruing more PageRank than other pages then all one needs to do is leverage these pages to link to less favored content on the site.
Some SEOs also complained that these types of pages tended to outrank other pages. Well, that’s just poor search engine optimization and you can easily remedy that problem without jumping through hoops.
Even people at Google advised the SEO community as ago as 2007 (soon after PageRank sculpting became all the rage) to keep these “incidental” pages in the mix because they really ARE important enough that people search for them.
Add to all this the fact that no one in the SEO community has the ability to track and measure PageRank (meaning none of us knows which pages have how much, which links pass it, and how much is being passed), and the whole concept just falls apart faster than you can say “house of cards”.
Rand seems desperate to rescue one of the most stupid ideas in SEO history from the trash heap of failed techniques, and that’s just a shame. He is capable of pursuing much more worthy goals.
@Michael Martinez – Thanks for reading and your comment. Very good points, especially the one that even Google has stated in the past that incidental pages are important because people search for them…
Michael and me don’t always agree on PageRank sculpting issues, but I have always advocated that “overhead” pages are better served performing the function of “quarterbacks” thus you might even want more of them, not less.
Each one provides a unique opportunity to link to pages that matter, and whilst there is in theory some form of dampening factor between hops, these pages don’t require additional static navigation and can focus their juice where it counts.
The kind of sculpting I am most fond of is nuking external links on duplicate content pages. I have a new solution for that coming out soon.
Hi Andy – Thanks for your comment…I look forward to hearing more about the new solution you have coming out…thanks!
Thanks a million for supplying the excellent info that you do on SEO. Speaking as someone who is trying to learn SEO as I learn everything else about internet marketing, it is good to find a place with clear, detailed, accurate, white-hat advice.
From my perspective, it is very confusing because so many people claim to be seo experts and they probably really aren’t. Or they pass black hat crap off as a good idea. I am very glad I got referred to this site.
Lorraine
Hi Lorraine – Thanks for your kind words and being a loyal reader!