Flow of internal link equity

[SteveOllington]

I've recently come across this:

A site changes the URL of one internal page to something more search friendly, and 301's the old to the new as you would expect.

They don't change the link on the homepage in the navigation. Instead they keep it to the old URL so they go through the 301 to get to the page even though it's internal.

They say if they change the URL it will reset the internal flow of link equity to that page.

I've not come across this before and so am not sure what to think. I mean I can see what they're saying but I would have though that it being internal would mean it's different and that the flow to internal pages would just kind of resume as-was quite soon afterwards.

Any views?

[EGOL]

Steve...  "P" for Pope too!

[SteveOllington]

Hehe I felt the need to go check out the pope's new site from that, nice amount of links as one would expect but some awful on-site... the whole thing is an image, and then tables instead of CSS on other pages... and no analytics

http://www.vatican.va/phome_en.htm

[EGOL]

...and refuse to give it upper-case on principle

Bad attitude... you will never get a link from the Pope's new site until you start using "G".

[SteveOllington]

"Ask them if they ever hunt rabbits.

Then ask if they try to kill them by shooting straight at them or if they try to hit them with a ricochet.  :-)"

EGOL, it may get me into trouble but I swear to god I am actually going to do that... I'm going to ask them that exactly how you've said it because I just won't be able to resist it now lol.

Thanks... for the burst of laughter and for the answer I needed!

P.S. All Viewers: Before anybody points it out, I know god is meant to have a capital G but I'm an anti-theist and refuse to give it upper-case on principle (I get corrected on that purposeful typo a lot so thought I'd nip it in the bud this time).

[EGOL]

They don't change the link on the homepage in the navigation. Instead they keep it to the old URL so they go through the 301 to get to the page even though it's internal.

Ask them if they ever hunt rabbits.

Then ask if they try to kill them by shooting straight at them or if they try to hit them with a ricochet. 

They say if they change the URL it will reset the internal flow of link equity to that page.

If you have trouble extracting them from this thinking then I don't think that they are ready for your services.  You will be pulling teeth through every step of the job.

[SteveOllington]

Yeah that's pretty much what I was thinking but then could they be right? I mean there doesn't seem to be any data anywhere to show if it does have an affect on the linked-to page (however minimal). Somebody somewhere must have tested it.

It does make sense to keep it seen as a moved page and not a new one to keep whatever trust it's built up but surely as an internal page, any new page that replaces it wouldn't take long to pull that same trust back in anyway (this is based on the fact that it's not exactly got a lot of equity anyway).

[Marcus_Miller]

Yep, that sounds like a load  of old cobblers to me. Surely, you change a page, you update your navigation?

"reset the internal flow of link equity?" - really? So, are they implying that if they link to the new page in the navigation, it will somehow affect the ranking of said page. But if they use the 301 it will be fine?

Sounds like someone not really getting what is going on here behind the scenes. I can only imagine that they want googlebot to crawl that link to realise the page name has been updated and have somehow extrapolated this from that train of thought with the intention of making sure it is seen as  a moved page rather than a new one.

Marcus