yxpert - Welcome to WebmasterWorld. It sounds like you have site structure and PageRank distribution conceptually well in hand, but you might find this thread of interest....

Search Engine Theme Pyramids and Google
Optimising the Pyramid for PageRank
[webmasterworld.com...]

With regard to top level pages, a lot may depend on what kind of inbound links you're getting. If you're expecting interior pages to be getting inbounds, then not all of your PageRank will be filtering down from home, and you may find that globally linking to some of your top level pages might be helpful. I feel you should always link back to your home page, and also give your most important and competitive pages a nav link boost where you can.

Take a look at the homepage links on dmoz to see how both visitors and PageRank can be distributed to your most important pages.

Thanks Robert. The topic you suggested was very helpful.

However my major concern is to prevent my important pages from being penalized because of exscessive number of outbound links (or does that not matter in internal linking?)

For example, there hunderds of pages under "fruit.html". My current approach is the following (pyramid again):

1. I have created a set of index URLs (Index1, Index 2, Index3 etc)
2. Each one of those index pages has a link to up to 50 targeted lower level URLs
3. I maintain another page (Index.html) that contains a link for each of the Index1, Index2,...
4. The fruit.html has a link to Index.html

All lower level URLs link back to fruit.html which links back to food.html.

Is this a good approach?

yxpert - This is not exactly answering your question, but I'm jammed up for time and see that I will be for a while.

Look at my post in this thread, which has some considerations similar to yours and some information that might apply...

Link Structure for Articles
[webmasterworld.com...]

You're not going to get "penalized" for too many links from a page, but you might find that you don't have enough PageRank to get your entire site spidered or ranking if you expand it too quickly.

I'd have to see your plan on paper to get a better idea of what you're doing. In general, if you don't have a lot of PageRank, 50 links from a page is maybe too many. I know this sounds old fashioned, but PR can matter (it's just that you need other things too). Sounds like you're going to need a high a PR7 home page, or a high PR6, and/or lots of deep links, to make this work.

Thanks Robert.

All my effort aims at increasing the PR of the top pages
food.html, fruit.html, meat.html and vegies.html.

I understand that linking from the lower level pages back to the ones above may achieve that. But will those top ones be penalized for linking to the detailed ones? Is Javascript a better alternative here?

Another concern here is that two different domain names point to my site. Yahoo Site Explorer shows "inlinks" from one domain to the other. Would that be considered spam?

Than you for your time.

Another concern here is that two different domain names point to my site.

"Point" is a very vague term, used in so many ways that I'm generally not sure what people mean by it.

If you mean that the site appears under two different domain names, this has the potential to cause some major problems. Such sites are called "mirror sites."

Because you have the same content on two different sets of urls, the engines will treat each of the pages as duplicate content. On Google, this generally means that the page with the lower PageRank will drop out, but you won't always be able to control which one that is.

The dupes will also be creating linking confusion, effectively splitting your inbound link vote, but since only one domain will rank, you'll be throwing half your link votes away.

You need to choose one "master" domain and redirect the other domain to it, using mod_rewrite (if you're on Apache) and a 301 permanent redirect. You should also decide whether you want your site to default to a www or non-www url, and use mod_rewrite to address that as well.

But will those top ones be penalized for linking to the detailed ones? Is Javascript a better alternative here?

"Penalize" is not the right word. You're simply asking about wise versus unwise distribution of PageRank. You don't want your top pages to link to every single lower page. Read the "Link Structure for Articles" thread I mention above, as well as the "Optimizing the Pyramid for PageRank" thread, and also study how DMOZ handles PageRank distribution from its home page.

I don't recommend using javascript links to control the flow of PageRank. DMOZ does what it does to channel users to its most important categories, and that has a side benefit of handling PageRank distribution too.

Thank you once more!

Hi Robert,

Sorry if I become annoying by bringing the issue back but you are a person in the know so I need your assistance once more.

The truth of the mater is that I started promoted a theme site X and later decided to promote a different theme Y. I did not like the domain name that I had registered for X (say generic_name_1.com) so I registered another one (say generic_name_2.com). Neither one is directly related to any theme with any sort of keyword combination. When I asked my provider to switch over they asked me for more money so I decided to keep the old one as root and leave the new one as an 'external pointer'. At the same time I started promoting a couple of other themes (say A and B) using generic_name_1.com. I call them "virtual sites" because they only existed in different sub-directories of the root. Actually I was redirecting vistors according to the HTTP_REFERER variable. I forgot to mention that the site is hosted on Windows servers. The majority of the pages are .htm and some (the most important ones .asp).

Then I decided to find an additional provider that provided hosting on Linux. There I have been promoting a different theme (say Z) under a different domain name of course.

Now I have decided to concentrate on theme Y only and stop bothering about anything else. I'd like to keep both generic_name_1.com and generic_name_2.com though.

As far as the Search Engines are concerned:

Google: Ranks generic_name_1.com 3/10 and generic_name_2.com 0/10.
However it indexes the majority of my pages under generic_name_2.com
considering probably generic_name_1.com as mirror

Yahoo: It indexes pages under both domains. The majority of them appear as a URL address only (no title or description) though which I suppose it is some sort of penalty. Those with the best positions in the result pages are under generic_name_2.com.

MSN: Indexes only a handful under generic_name_2.com. Some of them (the important ones) have very good search positions.

I am thinking of paying my Windows hosting provider to switch the whole site over to generic_name_2.com and just point generic_name_1.com to the Linuk provider. So the theme I like to promote will be only pointed by generic_name_2.com.

What do you think about that?
What should I do with Yahoo that indexes my pages under both domains?
Should I keep the theme under generic_name_1.com (instead of generic_name_1.com) -just because of its must better ranking in Google- and point generic_name_2.com to the the other site hosted on Linux?

yxpert - I'm afraid you've caught me at a bad time. I'm not going to be able to respond for a couple of weeks... getting ready to leave town in a few days... but maybe someone else will be able to help you.

My suggestion is, since this is really a completely different topic from your original post, that you post again, with a new on-topic title, and also that you hone your question way down.

Thanks Robert