Inbound Links
Inbound links (links into the site from the outside) are
one way to increase a site's total PageRank. The other is
to add more pages. Where the links come from matters. As was
said at the beginning, inbound links from link farms can damage
the PageRank and the site, and should be avoided.
The linking page's PageRank is important, but so is the number
of links going from that page. For instance, if you are the
only link from a page that has a lowly PR2, you will receive
an injection of 0.15 + 0.85(2/1) = 1.85 into your site, whereas
a link from a PR8 page that has another 99 links from it will
increase your site's PageRank by 0.15 + 0.85(7/100) = 0.2095.
Clearly, the PR2 link is much better - or is it? See here
for a probable reason why this is not the case.
Once the PageRank is injected into your site, the calculations
are done again and each page's PageRank is changed. Depending
on the internal link structure, some pages' PageRank is increased,
some are unchanged but no pages lose any PageRank.
It is beneficial to have the inbound links coming to the
pages to which you are channeling your PageRank. A PageRank
injection to any other page will be spread around the site
through the internal links. The important pages will receive
an increase, but not as much of an increase as when they are
linked to directly. The page that receives the inbound link,
makes the biggest gain.
It is easy to think of our site as being a small, self-contained
network of pages. When we do the PageRank calculations we
are dealing with our small network. If we make a link to another
site, we lose some of our network's PageRank, and if we receive
a link, our network's PageRank is added to. But it isn't like
that. For the PageRank calculations, there is only one network
- every page that Google has in its index. Each iteration
of the calculation is done on the entire network and not on
individual websites.
Because the entire network is interlinked, and every link
and every page plays its part in each iteration of the calculations,
it is impossible for us to calculate the effect of inbound
links to our site with any realistic accuracy.
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