Website architecture and sitewide link

[seoanalytics]

Hello,

I was reading this article about website architecture http://www.seomoz.org/blog/site-architecture-for-seo and I have a question about site wide link...

I don't think site wide link are good if you want your homepage to have the most " juice " can someone confirm that to me.

What I mean by site wide link is let's say I have  a page about golf in califorina and I create a link to another page of my website which is about  golf in florida  that a good practicee to do that or not ?

I just used this calculator http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank_calculator.php and and if I do site wide links the juice doesn't go to my most important page ( the homepage ) which is the one I currently want to have the most juice.

However, I noticed that website like amazon do site wide link let's say you are looking at a book and they have lots of links for other books or categories and they still rank very well for the word "textbooks" so I am kind of lost and don't understand why they still rank even though to me their juice goes away by doing site wide links to other books or categories ( even though it is related )

Can someone tell me more about site wide links are they good , bad etc... and is this calculator I use right or wrong ?

Thank you

[AlanBleiweiss]

Site-Wide links are absolutely valid and best practice implementation when they are pointing to a page on your site that is high value.  Think of it like this - your main site-wide navigation should point to your highest level product or services page, your "about" page, your "contact" page, and so forth.  This is based on user experience.  Users should be able to effortlessly get directly to those most important pages.  The home page is NOT the only very important page on the site, so why would you hide links to those others?

At the same time, it's NOT best practices to attempt to artificially increase the "perceived importance" of a page that should not be considered that important from a user perspective.

This concept is also about a bigger concern I have with your understanding.  If you do not properly set up site architecture to help users, your home page will not get it's maximum value anyhow.  And your home page should not, by itself, automatically rank higher for all your primary phrases than those other high level pages should.