…Another Reason to Invest in Multiple Articles on Related Topics

For a long time there has been a logic in the SEO community that goes something like this: If you have a top level page, which has a good search engine ranking, you should restrict the amount of outgoing internal links from that page, since the amount of link juice that each page receives is equal to the number of outgoing pages divided by initial pagerank of the top level page. In light of this understanding of how pagerank and its transpositional characteristics work, people often spent a lot of time limiting the amount of pages that treed off of their best ranking pages. They figured that it would help them create more powerful pages and thus raise the entire ranking of their site. Too many outgoing pages would weaken each page and limit the effect than the content on those pages would have.

Well this logic seems to be as dead as keyword stuffing. While one obviously doesn't want to suggest that tons of unrelated outgoing pages from good primary pages is a sound business strategy, good related content can really help increase the aggregate value of a group of pages.

Matt Cutts, Google's lead Spam Cop, talked to SEOMoz's Rand Fishkin, about a wide range of SEO related topics. His explanation of how the pagerank juice is dispersed amongst its outgoing pages blows up conventional ideas about how the process works. He asserts that google uses a more cyclical analysis of page's relate to each other. Each time the google bot circles the linked pages, they go through multiple iterations of the relationship between each page spreading the pagerank out more based on the value of the page and not just the value of page it is linking from. The more useful information you link together the better they transmit pagerank from page to page.

This is further evidence that building pages of related content, either through a series addressing a particular topic in its various permutations, or just sticking to a subject and really tackling all its various sides, will only help the total value of your site. Creating a circle of good content will also help build goodwill amongst your users, encouraging both more time on your site as well as more chances to have your content linked to.

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