Link Consolidation to Make the Most of Your Page Rank

In the past, webmasters would try to ensure that page rank was passed to the most important pages of the site through the method of page sculpting. Essentially this would mean utilising the nofollow attribute on unimportant links so that PageRank was shared out amongst the most important pages rather than being diluted and shared out between all the links.

All three of these links can then be moved from the home page and placed on this new company page. This consolidates the number of links on the home page by reducing three links to one, hence, wasting less PageRank.

Due to changes however, this method is no longer effective, and the PageRank will still be shared out amongst all the links in the site, even those that have been nofollowed.

The number of internal links which appear on any given page on a website is an important factor for Search Engine Optimisation. The number of links on a page dictates how PageRank will be spread across the site.

Gemma Neesham
Project Manager

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A good example of this can be seen on website home pages where there are links to pages such as delivery information, terms and conditions and privacy statements etc. It is obvious that a company would not really benefit from these pages gaining high PageRank. It would be more beneficial for the PageRank to be passed to top level category pages which can then be fed down to the products. Therefore to resolve the issue it would be beneficial to take the three links (delivery information, terms and conditions and privacy statements) and create one new page with a generic name, such as ‘company information’.

The best way of ensuring that your most important pages get past PageRank is through the process of link consolidation. This method ensures that only necessary links appear on any given page, and that all unnecessary links that would waste the PageRank are moved to a different part of the site.