Has PR been devalued this time?

You mean I'm right?

hehehe, just kidding. Yup, it's difficult to relay some of the concepts in text sometimes, and meanings can get a little confusing

Jeez that will teach me to take a long weekend ... look at all the activity in this thread.

Axe you are correct ... it certainly is a balancing act to maximize your internal PR and outgoing links. With my own site 1/4 of the backlinks are internal pages. So good navigation CAN increase your site PR.

I've noticed some sites that increase the number of internal links in order to reduce the page rank leak. Others simply isolate the link page, surrendering one page of PR to the outside world.

I don't think there is one solution to the problem ... it really depends on many factors within your site.

Yup, it does.

One trick that can work well though, is having links from other people that link to specific pages on your site (rather than straight to your homepage)

Often, you may have something on your site related to another site, and you may want them to link to you, but they may not want to link to your main page - perhaps it's too difficult (or at least not-too-obvious) to navigate through your site to find what they want their users to see.

Linking to those specific pages and passing the PR along to those specific pages not only helps boost those pages a bit more (especially as they're probably much lower PR than your homepage), but it will also help competitors from finding your backlinks. Most people will only look at the backlinks of the homepage when seeking to find backlinks for themselves.

In addition to what Axe said...it will also boost your home page PR if you link those internal pages back to the main entrance.

phaugh

Be careful with internal links.

I have been examining navigation structures ... and additional links can reduce overall site PR.

Remember PR is divided by the number of links. The more links you have the less PR to be shared with other pages.

You want to try and channel PR to your most important pages.

"You want to try and channel PR to your most important pages." So wouldn't that mean linking back to the home page...and from a usablility standpoint you should always be able to get back home from anywhere in the site.

Depends on your site ...

Take OZZU for example:

The important page is the home page of course ... and a link does appear on every page.

But the TOPIC pages (those links at the top right) also appear on every page and PR is channelled to them as well, which is in turn passed back to the home page.

In effect a feedback loop can be created ... the higher the home page PR, the better the topic page PR ... and the more PR passed back to the home page.