EN World #3 at Google

The ideal thing, I guess, would be for the front page and the 4E news page to have a combined pagerank. I can't think of a way to accomplish that, though. It's a shame it's a "page" rank, and not a "site" rank, because we'd jump a lot, I imagine.
 

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Well... there are some things you can do. This'll require a little explaining, so bear with me for a bit. Think of a link to a page as a vote for that page, and this should all make sense.

There are two main components that determine how much pagerank a given page has:
1) How many other pages on the internet link to it. The more pages, the more pagerank.
2) How much pagerank the pages containing the link have. The higher the rank, the more pagerank gained by the destination page.

The best is to get lots of links from highly ranked sites. A link from the front page of BBC is worth vastly more than someone's myspace page. That being said, the long tail of sites scattered across the web plays a HUGE role in determining ranks.

There is a final thing that determines how much a given link is worth: how many outgoing links there are on the same page. All things being equal, a link from a page with 50 links is worth more than if that same page had 300 outgoing links.

You don't have control over how other people build their own sites or how much pagerank they have, but you can influence what happens inside your own site.


So here's upshot #1: In an extreme example, you could transfer almost all of the front page's pagerank to the 4e page if google only saw that one outgoing link from the front page. The conflict arises from the fact that while it may be good for SEO, it's not so good for website usability. ;) It ends up being a balancing act between managing the number of outbound links on the front page and keeping it useful to users. There's a lot of planning and organization involved, but the results can be impressive.

Upshot #2: If every page on ENWorld had an h1 link to the 4e page, you would harness the long tail of your own site. Header tags lend a little extra weight within a page. They tell google that the content is more important to the user.

Upshot #3: Make sure that the links within ENWorld to the 4e page are not encapsulated in javascript. Google ignores stuff in javascript as far as I know. A link in the actual body tag is the way to go.

One final note: make sure that you have a hard url for the 4e page that doesn't contain any CGI tags. If you can contain the relevant keywords in the permanent url, it's even better. Something along the lines of http://www.enworld.org/4e-dungeons-and-dragons.html would work.

It's a lot like frying ants with a magnifying lens - once you get the principles down, it's mostly pretty straightforward. I hope this helps!
-blarg
 

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