Most of the sites I work on these days are on the small end of the scale, but a few are large news portals. One of them went through a site redesign a few months ago (before I got involved), and they’ve seen a large dropoff in traffic. I’m starting to look into why that happened, and wanted to share some ideas about how to fix the problem.
The fine folks over at SEOmoz provide Pro members with the ability do neat link analysis of web sites and download a CSV of the raw data. Will Critchlow posted over there recently about Advanced Link Analysis Charts to analyze SEOmoz data through their API and a bunch of spiffy Excel graphs. I’m more of a PHP guy, so I put together some very raw beginning code to read in the Linkscape CSV and show pretty pictures using Google Chart.
Looking today at a client’s blog SEO, I noticed that they’ve got PageRank heading to their wp-login.php:
Working today on a client site that had a couple of PageRank issues, I once again ran A1 Website Analyzer, and found a couple of interesting problems. Just let it scan the site, then click ‘Analyze website’ and ‘External’ to see how much on-site link love is headed off-site:
On this particular site, each page links to a customer support portal hosted by SalesForce.com. So by not using rel=”nofollow”, we’re sending all that tasty link juice to SalesForce. No good!
The way this link was set up, we were leaking as much PageRank to SalesForce as we send to our own 2nd-level pages. Fixing this should help significantly.
The other problem is that the home page has lower on-site PageRank than other pages, but the solution for that will have to wait for another day.
I’ve seen this a bunch recently, so when I saw this on Twitter tonight, I was curious what was up:
I have a great new tool that spiders sites and helps understand what’s up with on-site PageRank flow. It’s A1 Website Analyzer (free full-featured 30-day trial download), from Microsys Tools. I’ve used Xenu and other spider tools in the past, but what sets this tool apart is their on-site PageRank simulator. This is a GREAT asset for understanding where PageRank is going and how to make it flow better.
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I'm a web developer, SEO and PPC guy in the midwest. Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you find some useful info! You can follow me on Twitter @gcrocker.
