For those of you who haven’t read the rivetingly boring but useful article on how pagerank works by Ian Rogers. You are missing out, or possibly have a girlfriend. Either way I suggest at least once in your career…fold up your girlfriend, stuff her in your front pocket and give it a good thorough reading. It gives some great insight on how Google calculates your page rank. How is this useful? It’s not. Except that you learn that ALL links to a single page affect your page rank including those inside your own site. So whats the best way to organize your site so you can gain the most page rank to your main page? The structure is simple and I’ll explain it to you, but first understand that the solution isn’t practical. If you organize your site this way your visitors will click on the red X faster than their Google toolbar can inform them how “important” your site is. Lets first look at what Google’s algorithm considers to be the perfect site, and then we’ll figure out a way around it.


Yes I rock at MS Paint. Quit denyin my skills biznatch!

For those of you who took my advice and read the article you will quickly understand the math behind why this model works the best. Unfortunately, if you have a 100 page site, it will take your visitors the rest of their lives to find the article they were looking for this way. So lets look at an alternative.

With this method each page will theoretically push one third of one third of it’s 1 page rank. Did this make sense? That means each page you add on to this structure gives your main page approximately 0.11 page rank points. So I suggest you try this tried and true method of creating a “mini articles directory.” Place as many articles that relate to your main topic(this is very important, you don’t want your site to be off topic) as you can in this structure. Then create a page that links to all the articles. Somewhere on your site(on a low level PR page) create the first page of the articles directory. Then create a way for visitors to submit their articles.

This creates several advantages:

1) Your site has useful articles on your subject. Consistently gaining in relevant content is always smiled upon by the search engines.

2) More entry points to your site that contain easy to find links to your main page

3) You get to advertise yourself to other webmasters as an article post site(you will get a few inbound links for this) .

4) For every article submitted your main page gains approximately 0.11 of a page rank point. Note: I say approximately because Google uses a delimiter in their equation and there is no way of telling for sure what it is at the current moment. Either way, you can use this technique to your hearts content. Search engines will love you for it, and you can boost your page rank in a method that is much more reliable than seeking inbound links.

Like all methods and techniques in SEO don’t rely 100% on one single method. Juxtapose this method with your current for a little extra boost above your competition.