This is a long and detailed post – but an important one for an SEO foundation for your site.

Dynamic Linking, Anchor text and Reputation

Ok now let’s talk about the yin and yang – if the user experience is the yin then we also need the yang to balance it all out. That’s where you set the pages up to allow the search engines to find your pages and love them.

There is something called the Page Rank Checker (http://prchecker.info), put together by Google of course, that can give us a little insight to how well we are doing. Page rank takes many factors into consideration and the better you have your pages set up for Googles spiders the higher your page rank will be on a scale of 0-10 (10 being best).

If we allow some of the “no value” pages to get good ranking or have value in Googles eyes it hurts our pages that we want to have the highest value and traffic (no value pages – i.e. privacy policy, terms and conditions, etc.). So we can tell Google (and the Page Rank Checker) which ones we want to have the value and the ones we do want to have any value.

Be sure to read this twice – if you give all of your pages an equal shot at ranking on Google the ones you may not care about ranking will take some of the rank from your “high-value” pages. How do we control this?

Use “no-follow” tags. That way we can tell the spiders which ones to take a look at and rank and which ones to ignore. Beautiful! But HIGHLY UNDERUSED!!!

This leads to our section on Dynamic Linking.

Dynamic Linking

This is a concept that allows you to focus that page rank on the pages you want to rank well and get attention by the search engines.

The next 2 statements are important – a page that has incoming links is getting page rank from each of the links coming in. The higher the page rank of each link coming in the better for that page and higher the page rank goes.

On the flip side as that page links to other pages it divides page rank between each link it sends out. Therefore with too many links going out the rank is diminished with each link. So there is a slight balancing act to be employed – get high links coming in and give a few high value links going to the right pages. How can you control it = no-follow tags. Assign this tag to those pages you don’t care if they rank (terms & conditions, privacy etc.) and you can increase the value of other links and the overall page rank in general. Now you are dividing page rank between fewer pages.

Here is what it will look like when using it in your HTML code;

<a href=”terms.html” rel=”nofollow”>Terms and Conditions</a>

Ok that’s it! Simple

But where do you use it, how often and why?

Top Level Rank Development – Your Index/Home Page

Lot’s of links flow to and from the Top Level Index/Homepage so here is the SUGGESTED and RECOMMENDED areas for no-follow tag;

• Add no-follow on all of the links to your “overhead” pages. If you have a shopping cart, this includes the link to the cart.
• Add no-follow on all of the links that point to other sites, unless you have a logical reason to give a direct link.
• Do not use no-follow on the link to your site map page, if you have one.
• Do not use no-follow on the link to your “resources” page, if you are exchanging links.
• Do not use no-follow on the links to your second, third, and fourth level pages, unless you don’t want them to show up in search results for some reason.

Second Level Rank Development

• Add no-follow on all the links to your “overhead” pages, as above, unless you want some of them to get indexed.
• Add no-follow on outbound links to other sites, unless you have agreed to a direct link, or want to pass some “link love” along to that site.
• Add no-follow on all links to the site map. From the spider’s perspective, the site map is only linked from the home page.
• Add no-follow on the link to your “resources” page, if you are exchanging links. The resources page is only directly linked from the home page.
• Do not use no-follow on links to your second, third, fourth level pages, unless you don’t want them to show up in search results.

Third Level Rank Development

Typically with so much of the linking going from the top level to the second level it will keep the third level from developing much page rank. But this can be where many of your product purchase pages or information pages are. Here is what you can do to drive page rank a little deeper;

• On all second level pages, add no-follow on all links pointing to other second tier pages – unless you’re trying to boost a specific page.

Simple isn’t it? So on a shopping cart site, this means that your “category pages” still link to each other, but you use no-follow. From the spider’s perspective, your navigation is different on the second level from the top level.

Third Level Linking Strategy

If you have a second level that is a category unto itself and the third level beneath it is common to the second level category only you can link the third level together in a ring.

A couple of things to keep in mind when using no-follow;

• If you are using no-follow links from “page a” to “page b” then you should probably go ahead and use no-follow on every link going from the “page a” to the “page b” i.e. if your are using no-follow from the “home page” to the “terms of use page” then you should have all links going to the “terms of use” page as no- follow.
• If you are using multiple links from “page a” to “page b” the only link that will count for link reputation utilizing the desired anchor text will be the first one that appears in the code. So be sure the first link in the code is the keyword you desire to rank for and get indexed on the search engines for.

Don’t try to do too much with your internal linking strategies. Keep it basic as in this post and you should do well. Again these are recommendations and suggestions.