Dangling Links: Must Avoid Them
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You might have heard of the term dangling link or the plural of it dangling links, if you have been around SEO. The term dangling link refers to a link that directs the user to a page on the same site, but this page on the site doesn’t have any outgoing links. Thus when you click on a dangling link, you will visit a page on the same site.
Usually Pages That Have Not Been Indexed
Most of the times, it is considered a dangling link, a link pointing to a page on the website which hasn’t yet been indexed on the engines. In terms of calculation of page rank of a website, what Google will typically do, is to remove all the dangling link occurrences and estimate the overall page rank of the site. Then once the page rank gets determined the dangling link can be added back, without having much effect on the overall score of the site.
How Page Rank Gets Calculated
Page rank calculation, depends on a number of criteria, such as the total number of pages on a website, the type of linkages to each of the pages, as well as the kind of page it is and more. Then based on these parameters the overall page rank gets calculated on average.
For example let’s say page A links to page B on a site, and page B links to page A. Page A also links to page C. Page C doesn’t have links to either A or B. Page C has no links to any page. That’s why it becomes an orphan page. The link from page A to C is a dangling link. As per indexing rules followed by search engines, no orphan page can exist on the search engine results.
That means in terms of search engine results, page C does not even exist. Thus even though the website has 3 pages and the page rank potential is actually 3, due to a dangling link, only two pages – page A and B are scored and calculated. The obvious Seo Advice it is to avoid this kind of situation!
Wastage Of Page Rank
In the above example we saw how using a dangling link could actually harm the page rank of your site. However most of the time you have to avoid to have such dangling link occurrences in order to ensure smooth site navigation and good user experience. Most search engines will remove dangling links in their calculations. Once the potential page rank of the website gets estimated then the dangling link will be added. Through such an approach there isn’t usually a very large deviation from the potential page ranking of the website.
Page Rank: As Precious As It Can Get!
When it comes to page rank, most webmasters would scramble whatever they can, to reach top position in search engine results. No wonder then that no site in their right mind would dream of wasting even a little bit of page rank! Using a dangling link can cause a minor reduction in the overall page rank of the site.
So let’s say your site has 10 pages in it. It can actually have a potential value of 10. But by having dangling link occurrences, you are reducing the value a great deal.
Even a small difference can have significant impact on the search engine results of your site. Why compromise on page rank just because of dangling link occurrences? Instead it is much better to stay away with such dangling link occurrences and focus on enhancing the page rank to the best level possible!
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Fabio Uncinotti is from Italy where he graduated as a webmaster. He is an Internet Marketer and Seo Consultant,
owns several websites that are on the first pages of Google, and that is what he is most passionate about.
He regularly posts about free Seo advice, Internet Marketing and Social Media
Optimization.