Do You Understand the Ranking Power of Home Page Links?

The lesson I’m going to share with you today I learned by accident. And it was the single event that opened my eyes to the power of SEO and explained to me why most bloggers don’t “get it”. It has to do with the power of links you put on the home page of your site, regardless of whether you run a blog, a website, or both. First I’ll share my story with you then go into some more detail about how you can turn links into traffic and then into money.

It started with Apple’s Refurbished iPhone

True story. In September 2007, I was behind on posting to The Dough Roller, my money management blog, and threw together a quick post on how to buy a refurbished iPhone. I didn’t give SEO or keywords a second thought because back then I didn’t even know what SEO stood for. I hit the publish button and moved on.

Because I liked the post (mainly because I like Apple products), I put a link to it in my sidebar along with some of my other favorite articles. This meant that every single page of my blog, including my home page, had a link to this article. Again, that fact never crossed my mind at the time.

About a month later I noticed I was getting several hundred search engine visitors a day to this little article. Upon further investigation through Google Analytics, I learned that the article ranked #2 for the keyword, “refurbished iphone,” just behind Apple.

To say that I was stunned would be an understatement. Depending on the news of the day and season of the year, I’d sometimes get 500 to 700 visitors a day to that article. Wow! It was by far my most popular article, so at the time, it was very important to me, and I regularly tracked its rankings in Google. And it always remained #2.

WordPress theme change

In early 2008, I decided to change my WordPress theme for a new fresh look. I changed some of the links in my sidebar, but made sure to keep the iPhone article in the sidebar. About three days after the change, traffic to the refurbished iPhone article disappeared. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. At first I figured it was just a reshuffle of the Google SERPs. After all, The Dough Roller is a personal finance blog, not an iphone site, so how long could the rankings last, anyway.

But I couldn’t stop wondering if the drop in rankings had to do with the new theme. After a lot of investigation, the only change I could see was the placement of the link in the sidebar. I had moved it from directly below an h3 tag to the bottom of the sidebar. So I moved it back up to its prior position, and guess what? Yep. Three days later I was back up to the #2 position.

Now, you have to be really careful when assessing the cause and effect in search engine rankings. It’s very possible that the change in SERPs had absolutely nothing to do with this change. So being the experimental sort that I am, after the rankings returned, I pulled the link out of the sidebar completely. Three days later, gone from the SERPs.

Then I got really experimental. Realizing that a link in the sidebar appears on every page of the site, I decided to put the link back in, but with some php conditional tags, have it appear only on the home page. If you’re wondering how I did that, the code in my sidebar.php file looked something like this:

if(is_page('[page #]')) { ?>
How to Buy a Refurbished iPhone

It took some time, but eventually the article worked its way back up the SERPs to the #2 spot.
Today I still link to that article from my home page, but no longer in the sidebar.  Because the post is not that important to my site (for a number of reasons), I'm not focused on its ranking as much.  Yesterday it was ranked #2 again, today it's on the second  page.  Part of that is, from my perspective, changes at Google as compared to a year ago, but that's  for another post.
Page rank sculpting
So why do home page links have such a potential to affect your search rankings?  For most sites, and certainly most blogs, the home page has the highest page rank.  Page rank is simply a measure of the importance of a particular page on the Internet.  While some may refer to a site as having a certain page rank, it is really page specific.
In the page rank toolbar for Firefox that shows you the page rank of the page you're visiting, page rank is expressed as an integer ranging from 0 to 10.  Google has a PR of 10.  A new site, once it gets a page rank, typically starts at a 0 or 1.  These integers are just a representation of the page rank of each page; the actual page rank known only to the Wizard of Oz behind the big Google curtain is far more complex.  Here is the official definition of page rank:
PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.  PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page's importance.
Did you notice the reference to voting in the above quote?  Typically, when one page links to another, it is "voting" for that page.  And unless the rel="nofollow" tag is added to the link, the linking page passes page rank to the page being linked to.
Let's dispel a few misconceptions about page rank.  First, linking to other pages does not diminish the page rank of the page doing the linking.  Second, a page can only pass about 80% of its page rank, and that page rank gets divided up among all the links on the page.  So the more links on a page, the less page rank each link gets.
Important:  Page rank passes from links regardless of whether you link to another page on your site or to somebody else's site.  Because your home page probably has the highest page rank, the links on the home page are really important.  If you are looking to increase your ranking for a particular keyword, consider a home page link with the appropriate anchor text to the page you're looking to boost in the rankings.  I didn't appreciate this until after the iphone article experience.
Is it really that easy?
Yes and no.  Yes, by adding followed links on your home page to sub-pages you want to promote, you'll pass more page rank to those pages.  And page rank is an important factor in search rankings, so you may very well see positive changes as a result.  Now for the no part of the answer:

Page rank is just one of many, many ranking factors.
If your home page has a low PR, it obviously won't pass much juice.  But even at a 2 or 3 it can make a difference.
This can only work for so many pages.  As you add more followed links, the page rank that gets passed to each diminishes.
Always put your reader first, not SEO.  If readers need/want certain links on the home page that you don't want syphoning your page rank, no follow the links

What's on your home page?
So now take another look at your home page and sidebar, and consider the following questions:

Was it wise to sell text links?  Google doesn't like them, and now you may realize that the advertisers are "stealing" your page rank.
Do you need a blogroll with 58 followed links to other sites on every page of your site?  Link out to other sites in articles, which are far more valuable links anyway.
Do you need followed links to all of your categories, particularly those that aren't that important to your site?
Should you display the entire post on your home page, external links and all, or just an excerpt?
How important is a followed tag cloud?  Do your readers click on it anyway?

What's money got to do with this
If you've made it this far in the article, I'll share how I use home page links to make money.  Like most sites, mine have some pages that make me the most money, and some that don't make me any money.  For my money pages, I'll place followed links on my home page or other internal pages with high page rank.  I've personally seen how this affects search engine rankings for keywords that I track.  So if there is a page you want to promote in the rankings, whether for money or any other reason, make sure it is linked to from your home page or other high page rank pages of your site.
I now use the Thesis theme for most of my sites.  One of the reasons I love the theme is that it is very easy to customize the content on your WordPress blog.  For example, if you look at the category navigation at The Dough Roller that runs across the top of the site, you'll see those categories that are most important to me.  Click on any one of them and you'll see that the sidebar is different for each.
With customization through Thesis, I am able to show my readers different articles, products and services depending on which category the post is in that they are viewing.  Of course, this can be done with any theme by hacking away that the theme code (trust me, I've done it), but Thesis makes it much easier through what they call hooks.
Anyway, with hooks you can vary the links and anchor text that appear in the sidebar based on the category.  This is ideal for the reader, who gets information relevant to the article they are reading.  And it is ideal for SEO, too.