Tags v. Navigation Links

Many SEO practitioners bolt on extra navigation links to improve internal linking to important pages but I just noticed something on this blog that suggests that links inside of content (i.e. in the center part of the page) probably have more power, something which has been noted on other popular SEO blogs. For those of you not up to speed on this you might find this interesting.

First thing to note – the page rank number displayed in the Google Toolbar (aka TBPR) is more than likely not a page’s actual page rank score. That said there must be a reason that the TBPR is what it is for any given page so I like to think that it’s at least an indication of a page’s strength relative to other pages. Then again maybe everyone really is checking out Ashley Alexandra Dupre‘s MySpace page to hear her latest track “What We Want” (over 1,000,000 plays and counting).

Anyhow if you look at the TBPR of any of the category pages in the left nav of this blog you will notice that the only ones that have any TBPR are those that have more than one or two tag links from the blog posts that appear in the center of the page. This suggests to me that the tag links are passing significant amounts of page rank while the category navigation links are not.

This post brought to you by the Emperor’s Club V.I.P.