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06.08.09 Fixing Hanging Site Pages To Increase Ranking 
By Barry WelfordSearch Engine Optimization (SEO) for blogs is often not done effectively and posts rank below where they should be in keyword searches. One particular problem can be hanging/dangling web pages created by the blogging software coupled with inappropriate use of robots.txt files and tags. Such hanging web pages can act as sinks or black holes for PageRank, a key factor in the Google search algorithm. This article provides a simple explanation of the issues involved and appropriate solutions. "You are creating hanging/dangling pages", wrote Andy Beard in a recent comment on a post on Avoiding WordPress Duplicate Content. After an e-mail exchange, I could understand his concern. It is a potential problem that robots.txt files could create. As Andy wrote some time back, it is one of the SEO Linking Gotchas Even The Pros Make. More recently, Rand Fishkin has pointed out that you should not Accidentally Block Link Juice with Robots.txt. Rand advised doing the following: • Conserve link juice by using nofollow when linking to a URL that is robots.txt disallowed • If you know that disallowed pages have acquired link juice (particularly from external links), consider using meta noindex, follow instead so they can pass their link juice on to places on your site that need it. Link juice is just another term for PageRank. This PageRank value for any web page is an important element in how well it will rank in any keyword search. It may be one of over 100 factors but it probably is the most important in the Google keyword search process. Avoiding losing PageRank that a web page could amass is an important function that SEOs should pursue. After doing some research, it turns out to be a somewhat more complex issue requiring an understanding of some weighty articles. Anyone involved in doing SEO or hiring an SEO consultant should be aware of the potential problem to ensure things are done correctly. I also realized that there was no simple explanation of the issues so this post will attempt to rectify that omission.
Research on Hanging / Dangling Web Pages If you want to do some of your own research, before checking out the later explanations, I found the following useful: • Dangling Pages - WebProWorld SEO Forum • What Do SEO/SEM People Put In Robots.txt Files? - Shaun Anderson • WordPress robots.txt SEO - AskApache Web Development • Internal Linking - META nofollow, rel nofollow, robots.txt Confusion thereon - Josh Spaulding Of course with search engine algorithms, things are always in evolution. The official word on the Google website gives the following information on rel="nofollow". How does Google handle nofollowed links? We don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it's important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways. Continue reading this article. Barry Welford, President of SMM Internet Marketing Consultants works with business owners and senior management on Internet Marketing strategy and action plans to grow their companies. He is a moderator at the Cre8asite Forums and writes on Business and the Internet in four blogs, Senior Money Memos, BPWrap, StayGoLinks and The Other Bloke's Blog. |
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