Mapping and Tracking Dynamic Link Strategies
– by Leslie Rohde

Oftentimes the key to conceptually understanding a strategy lies in the analysis of a real-live case study. This month we have an opportunity to present a clarification of proper linking structure based on an exchange of questions and answers between professional search engine optimizers (SEO).

Background: William, a long time subscriber to SE-News, is a paid SEO advisor to a franchising company. With the sale of each business license, William builds a web site for the new franchisee. It bears the licensee's company name and contact information as well as provides general product and service information which is largely repeated from the franchiser's site.

Each new franchisee site links to the franchiser's home page and each has its own distinct domain name – following generally the name of the licensee's company – but each of the franchisee domains is hosted on the same server with the franchiser.

Following are several very good questions that should be of concern to most webmasters in charge of mapping out and tracking SEO linking strategies.

Why do the links from the franchisee pages not show up in Google nor in my OptiLink analysis?

This is a common problem. Google filters results so that linking pages with less than PageRank=4 (PR=4) are not shown. These "missing" links are indeed in the Google index and do contribute to link reputation and PageRank–they are just not returned in the link: query.

Currently, it does not appear that links from low PageRank pages count any less in Link Reputation than do links from higher PageRank pages. Of course, Google could certainly change this at any time but currently our research and experimentation indicates that, so far, all links are treated as equal. Since the linking from franchisee to franchiser is something you control, you should make these links the best they can be.

OptiLink relies on the link: query just as you would use in a standard browser. That is the reason you are not seeing the franchisee pages in your OptiLink analyses. However, you can still analyze pages missing from...