I've hardly every written a techincal blog entry, so the style is probably all wrong... But anyway, if you have your own website and are interested in it's search engine scoring, you might learn a thing or two waste some of your time by reading this:

All everybody cares about when promoting their website, whether commercial, personal or porn is their ranking in the search engines, primarily Google.

Google ranks pages based on it's patented trademark PageRank. It's a really clever system where each page is given a base ranking value. The number of links to each page whether internal or external to the page's website is important. For example, if one of my friends blogs links to me, I get extra PR.

The amount of PR I get from this friends website is dependant on their own rank and the number of sites they link to. If they have a PR of 5 and link to 10 websites then I get a tenth of that PR5.

Each of my blog entries links back to the home page so their (admittedly minimal) PR is given back to my internal links. However, the menu down the left appears on every page, so every page in my site gives some PR back to my 8 internal links under "Navigation" and the 9 external blog links. So, if you're linked by me you get PR for every page I have.

If I were to remove the external links and most of the internal navigation links, every blog entries PR would be given entirely to my home URL (www.kloopy.com/) subsequently increasing it's page rank. This increased PR will be spread amongst the links from the home page anyway, so I might end up doing this.

You can, of course, via excessive linking or a rapid increase in page content or links to/from your site, damage your PR. If you want to increase your PR, you need to get others to link to you slowly and add site content slowly (since each new page gives your entire site some extra PR).

Each page has a PR value that only Google knows. However, it scales every page's PR onto a 1 to 10 scale. You can find out a page's PR by using the Google Toolbar. The sections 1 to 10 are not a linear scale, to progress from PR1 to PR2 is far easier than progressing from PR7 to PR8.

Google uses the hidden PR values to help sort the search results for your search terms every time you search it's index.

Basically, with this introduction to PR, I can now tell you what I've found out...

I was linking to http://www.kloopy.com/latest from all my pages. This page is exactly the same content as http://www.kloopy.com/ on it's own. However, because Google cannot confirm the two URLs give the same page, they are treated as entirely different pages. Both oh those links on my site have PR5, which is pretty good since most other friend sites I have checked are PR4.

What I've done is update my website so that http://www.kloopy.com/latest doesn't appear anywhere. I'm not aware of any external links pointing to that URL so hopefully all that internal PR that was being split to it will not go to my root URL and increase it's PR further.

As an example of how good my PR is, check out the Google Search for Leeds Festival Photos. You'll see that, at the time of writing, Google returns three photos. The one on the left is mine and my Gallery links appear on page 2 of the result.

I wonder what I'm doing to get my PageRank so high. What ever it is, if you want to link to me let me know and we can do some PR swapping if you like!