snowbird
06-09-2008, 03:35 PM
Ok, here’s the scenario. You operate a Web Directory with thousands of listings yet your inner categories have little or no Pagerank after 2, 3 or more PR updates. You have tens of thousands of backlinks, but all the green toolbar love you get is on your homepage or submission page. Sound familiar? You bet it is, and the reason is poor internal linking structure of the most popular script.
The most popular directory script on the market is phpLD. It’s a feature rich directory script that can make managing thousands of listings a breeze. There are a couple downsides to this script, one being a way to easily update the Pagerank of the thousands of listed sites and the other being a poor internal linking structure. You may have heard some directory scripts are better at distributing Pagerank, and it is indeed true. But with some minor modifications, directory owners can make their phpLD directory Pagerank Optimized.
The purpose of this post is to help out fellow directory owners by giving a few tips to improve their inner category PR. I’m not into promoting or bashing directory scripts. This post is mainly written for phpLD, but the techniques can be applied to other scripts as well.
PR Sculpting
The first tip is to do a little PR Sculpting. What is PR Sculpting? It basically involves adding a nofollow to internal links that point to pages that serve no purpose in the search engine index. Before anyone asks, this is not a black or greyhat technique. Think about it, Google does not want its index filled with pages with little to no content and we certainly don’t want to waste Pagerank on pages that don’t have a snowballs chance in hell of ranking for anything worthwhile. You may want to consider adding a nofollow to your contact.php and submit.php pages. With phpLD version 3.3, you may also want to nofollow the article submit page. For those with a privacy policy and submit rules/guidelines page, those can also be nofollowed. Since these links normally appear sitewide, adding a nofollow to them will direct existing Pagerank to more important pages.
Important: If you want any of your pages to appear as Google Sitelinks, then do not nofollow them!
Limit Category Links on Homepage
Another way to preserve Pagerank to your homepage, and drive more PR to your categories, is to limit the number of sub-categories that are listed on the homepage. While this adds an inconvenience to some directory users, the benefit is less PR shared with internal links which equates to more PR flowing to your top level categories. If you look at the BOTW.org homepage, they list only three sub-categories under each parent category. Most of the higher PR directories you see have about three sub-categories listed max.
Improve Internal Linking Structure
With an easy to install mod, the default phpLD link detail pages can have an improved internal link structure designed to push Pagerank to the parent categories. I know, some will say the link detail pages have no Pagerank to give. Well, that’s not entirely true. If the link detail page is indexed, Google has assigned it “some” value. Granted, the actual PR may be 1/10th of a PR 1 but it still has value. Especially for free directories that have thousands of listings, such a slight change in internal linking can greatly improve category Pagerank. I talked to someone the other day who said he has phpLD 3.3 and it was not a problem. Wrong! phpLD does not have the extended category listing by default. It is a mod that must be added. You can get the mod here (http://www.directoryshare.com/free-phpld-mods.html#split-category-links), and it includes installation instructions for phpLD versions 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3.
Submit a Sitemap to the Major Search Engines
If you have quite a few listings in your directory, and installed the split category mod above, you should create and submit a detailed sitemap to the major search engines. Because existing detail pages are not crawled often, it is wise to get the bots to reindex those pages as soon as possible. Unfortunately phpLD does not have an option to list individual link detail pages in its internal sitemap creator. You'll need an external sitemap creator. Here's a link to a fully functional free sitemap creator (http://www.micro-sys.dk) for Windows. It will work without restrictions for 30 days, and will allow you plenty of time to crawl your entire site. The software will let you override the last mod date of each page. I suggest making it the current date. But before creating the sitemap, you may want to look at, and deal with, any duplicate content issues (see below). There's no sense wasting time creating and submitting a bloated XML sitemap file.
Reduce and Eliminate the Potential for Duplicate Content
Duplicate content can kill Website traffic, devalue important pages, and waste bandwidth on indexing pages that should not be indexed. Those using phpLD and other scripts may want to consider restricting the indexing of category sort options and pages that pass session variables. Category sort options that permit you to sort Alphabetically, Pagerank, and Hits are potential duplicate content issues as well as any URL that includes session variables. For the very detailed person wanting to eliminate all duplicate content, also consider blocking the indexing of your RSS feeds. To deal with these potential duplicate content problems, I use the Disallow option in my robots.txt file. Below is what it looks like.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /rss.php
Disallow: /submit.php?
Disallow: /captcha.php
Disallow: /*?s=P&
Disallow: /*?s=H&
Disallow: /*?s=A&
Backlinks to Categories
Of course you may also get some backlinks to your category pages which will improve Pagerank as well. A good way to get some backlinks is to use social bookmarking. I have a social bookmarking list (http://www.vmoptions.com/social-networking-list.php) which I use for other projects. The list would be very useful for any deep link building.
I hope this post will help some directory owners out. And if you have something to add to this “how to,” please feel free to post your thoughts below.
The most popular directory script on the market is phpLD. It’s a feature rich directory script that can make managing thousands of listings a breeze. There are a couple downsides to this script, one being a way to easily update the Pagerank of the thousands of listed sites and the other being a poor internal linking structure. You may have heard some directory scripts are better at distributing Pagerank, and it is indeed true. But with some minor modifications, directory owners can make their phpLD directory Pagerank Optimized.
The purpose of this post is to help out fellow directory owners by giving a few tips to improve their inner category PR. I’m not into promoting or bashing directory scripts. This post is mainly written for phpLD, but the techniques can be applied to other scripts as well.
PR Sculpting
The first tip is to do a little PR Sculpting. What is PR Sculpting? It basically involves adding a nofollow to internal links that point to pages that serve no purpose in the search engine index. Before anyone asks, this is not a black or greyhat technique. Think about it, Google does not want its index filled with pages with little to no content and we certainly don’t want to waste Pagerank on pages that don’t have a snowballs chance in hell of ranking for anything worthwhile. You may want to consider adding a nofollow to your contact.php and submit.php pages. With phpLD version 3.3, you may also want to nofollow the article submit page. For those with a privacy policy and submit rules/guidelines page, those can also be nofollowed. Since these links normally appear sitewide, adding a nofollow to them will direct existing Pagerank to more important pages.
Important: If you want any of your pages to appear as Google Sitelinks, then do not nofollow them!
Limit Category Links on Homepage
Another way to preserve Pagerank to your homepage, and drive more PR to your categories, is to limit the number of sub-categories that are listed on the homepage. While this adds an inconvenience to some directory users, the benefit is less PR shared with internal links which equates to more PR flowing to your top level categories. If you look at the BOTW.org homepage, they list only three sub-categories under each parent category. Most of the higher PR directories you see have about three sub-categories listed max.
Improve Internal Linking Structure
With an easy to install mod, the default phpLD link detail pages can have an improved internal link structure designed to push Pagerank to the parent categories. I know, some will say the link detail pages have no Pagerank to give. Well, that’s not entirely true. If the link detail page is indexed, Google has assigned it “some” value. Granted, the actual PR may be 1/10th of a PR 1 but it still has value. Especially for free directories that have thousands of listings, such a slight change in internal linking can greatly improve category Pagerank. I talked to someone the other day who said he has phpLD 3.3 and it was not a problem. Wrong! phpLD does not have the extended category listing by default. It is a mod that must be added. You can get the mod here (http://www.directoryshare.com/free-phpld-mods.html#split-category-links), and it includes installation instructions for phpLD versions 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3.
Submit a Sitemap to the Major Search Engines
If you have quite a few listings in your directory, and installed the split category mod above, you should create and submit a detailed sitemap to the major search engines. Because existing detail pages are not crawled often, it is wise to get the bots to reindex those pages as soon as possible. Unfortunately phpLD does not have an option to list individual link detail pages in its internal sitemap creator. You'll need an external sitemap creator. Here's a link to a fully functional free sitemap creator (http://www.micro-sys.dk) for Windows. It will work without restrictions for 30 days, and will allow you plenty of time to crawl your entire site. The software will let you override the last mod date of each page. I suggest making it the current date. But before creating the sitemap, you may want to look at, and deal with, any duplicate content issues (see below). There's no sense wasting time creating and submitting a bloated XML sitemap file.
Reduce and Eliminate the Potential for Duplicate Content
Duplicate content can kill Website traffic, devalue important pages, and waste bandwidth on indexing pages that should not be indexed. Those using phpLD and other scripts may want to consider restricting the indexing of category sort options and pages that pass session variables. Category sort options that permit you to sort Alphabetically, Pagerank, and Hits are potential duplicate content issues as well as any URL that includes session variables. For the very detailed person wanting to eliminate all duplicate content, also consider blocking the indexing of your RSS feeds. To deal with these potential duplicate content problems, I use the Disallow option in my robots.txt file. Below is what it looks like.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /rss.php
Disallow: /submit.php?
Disallow: /captcha.php
Disallow: /*?s=P&
Disallow: /*?s=H&
Disallow: /*?s=A&
Backlinks to Categories
Of course you may also get some backlinks to your category pages which will improve Pagerank as well. A good way to get some backlinks is to use social bookmarking. I have a social bookmarking list (http://www.vmoptions.com/social-networking-list.php) which I use for other projects. The list would be very useful for any deep link building.
I hope this post will help some directory owners out. And if you have something to add to this “how to,” please feel free to post your thoughts below.