I have several sites where people link to pages other than my home page. I've actually encouraged that, posting quality content, so I can post those links on special interest message boards without spamming.

My question is, if people link to those pages, does it help my home page PR or am I wasting my time with a few links back to several different pages that will never achieve a decent PR of their own?

TIA for any light you can shine on this question.

Suz

Hi suz (Fun4TheMoney,
Here's the real scoop on links.
People linking to your pages, any page-it doesn't matter, will NOT negatively affect your PR. It will ONLY enhance it !
Next, when you link to other peoples pages... it will "pass PR", ie. negatively affect your own PR , but not very much for each link.
Google (or any other search engine) has NEVER and probably will never hold you accountable for other peoples actions that are out of your control. That only makes sense, doesn't it ?
Hope this helps
RGPHNX
PS- If you need help on this & other SEO questions, you can find lots of true experts over at the following forum.
http://www.seochat.com

Thanks for the link. I'll check it out.

My basic question is:

Will a link to one of my other pages improve the page rank of my home page, or does the link have to be to my top level page in order to do any good? Ex: If I get 10 links back to each of 5 different sub-pages, that's 50 links back. Will they improve my domain home page PR as much as 50 links to my home page?

Hi again suz,
re:
In general what you want is to have incoming links (ie. people linking to you) to link to your main page to improve your PR. From what I've read...That is generally considered to me more effective in building PR than having links spread out all over on the "subpages" in your website. After you get enough links to to your homepage.. go for more links to your websites' subpages which wlii build the PR for each individual subpage. Some of this is open to speculation because Google won't disclose exactly how they assign PR to pages.
Hope this helps
RGPHNX

That's what I was afraid of. Thanks.

Hi:

Can you please clarify why you think links coming off your site dilute your page rank? I have a links page, and I have a ton of links on it. It is a very popular page in my site, because it is the only site that histology students can go to where the links are organized and categorized. Thus, I don't want to eliminate this page.

However, if this is diluting my page rank, perhaps I could put this page on a different server with a different URL.

Thanks.

Sunkist

I asked the question because I do a lot with deep links. I thought that having people link back to any of my pages would help my overall ranking in Google. When I thought about it, since the term is PAGE Rank, not "overall site rank" I started thinking that maybe I wasn't doing myself any good by spreading myself out like that, so I asked the question.

I said "dilute" because it appears that 10 links back to my home page are worth far more than 10 links spread out among my various other pages. If that's true, then we should be having people link only to our home page, then direct them to our other pages. That's a pain for visitors, however, making them do all that clicking when we could send them straight to what they want.

OTOH, Google finds all those other pages, too, during a search, so maybe it just doesn't matter. If you have a popular page, promote it and be happy. Who cares if it's not your home page?

Hint: I've also been told that part of Google's ranking scheme is how many links you have on a page. If you have a nice description of each of your links, Google will rate it higher than if it's just a page of links. You don't want Google to think you're just a "link farm."

The problem with all this is that nobody really knows for sure how Google "thinks" so this is all just conjecture anyway.

Hi Suz & sunkist,
Nice explaination Suz !
Sunkist..if you have further questions re: PR & links you can find hundreds of references on the subject over at the www.seochat.com
Hope this is clear.
RGPHNX

Thanks for that link and this topic, I've been looking for more ways to optimize my website for big search engines like google, everything that was disucssed here, and hopefully what I find at that site should help me optimize my site further.