Remove dangling pages, increase google juice and page rank

Is that a new term you heard? Dangling pages?

It probably got popularized by Andy more than anyone else, and I think there is some sense in the concept.

Dangling pages can be described as -

Links that point to any page with no outgoing links.

And according to Google’s docs -

They affect the model because it is not clear where their weight should be distributed, and there are a large number of them. Often these dangling links are simply pages that we have not downloaded yet……….Because dangling links do not affect the ranking of any other page directly, we simply remove them from the system until all the PageRanks are calculated. After all the PageRanks are calculated they can be added back in without affecting things significantly.” – extract from the original PageRank paper by Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page

A better description is also over here

OK, so Dangling pages are the ones that -

- updateAre not accessed by traffic/users
- Does have incoming links to it.
- Does not link to any page internally/externally.
- Does not carry any weightage what so ever.

Let me clarify something. Dangling pages are not the same as supplementary pages. Supplementary pages are a different scenario probably because they have the least importance in comparison to other pages on a website. They may pass juice and links. They get indexed but are not shown on the normal search index, while dangling pages may be shown.

When I worked with Alamy.com they had almost 60% of their individual HTML pages in the Supplementary Index, which were not preferred to be shown on the normal search index by Google. But none of them were Dangling pages. They all had severe interlinking done, and sometimes even relished links from outside.

But there were dangling pages too. There were pages and files in the live site, that were never used or linked to. They probably were installed for testing purposes and later not used. But they were indexed and Google thought they were scrap.

It could happen to your site too. In blogs, it is highly unlikely that there are dangling pages unless you have a poor template and a very poor linking system.

How to avoid dangling pages in a blog?

• Interlink pages as much as possible.
• Let there not be a page that does not link to any other page internally or externally.
• Let there be a universal navigation bar or linking structure that will ensure that even the most unimportant page get’s into the linking network.

So essentially, dangling pages are not good for your site/blog. Remove them or reduce their occurrences. Sometimes even an important page can be mistaken for a dangling page if the navigation structure fails to update the links.