Links to commercial pages vs resources.

[JacobFunnell]

My company has a number of resources pages that are garnering links from external sources. It won't be long before these links outnumber the breadth and the quality of links to my homepage and commercial pages.

Does having a lot more links to the resources pages risk unbalancing flow of PageRank around the site? What I want to avoid is a situation where my homepage has a lower PR than my blog/resources, or people searching for relevant terms getting directed to my blog/resources (with many high-quality links) than to my commercial pages (which will have fewer).

[JoeAmadon]

I understand the concern with having pages that don't convert as well outranking your "more important" pages. Fortunately, this is probably one of the better problems you could have. There are two things you can do to take advantage of this situation, assuming these pages exist in subfolders of your site and not as a subdomain or separate site.

First option, optimize the internal links on your resource pages to dirrect users and bots to your homepage and commercial pages that are relevant to the content of that specific resource page. The fewer links you have off these pages the better in order to not dilute the PR that is going to the pages you want to rank.

A second option, is to move the content to your commercial pages, assuming the information make sense to have on those pages, and 301 the resource page to the commercial page. I imagine this is going to be less ideal for users, depending on your site and content, but this should completely avoid the problem you're concerned about. I would only go this route, if option 1 doesn't work and the traffic that is entering your resource pages isn't converting.

And, although I don't know if search engines consider it at all, you have the option of designation a page's priority relative to the rest of your site in the sitemap. So you could set your resource pages' priority to .3 and your commercial pages to .7. But again, I don't know if this is actually used by search engines.

[AndyKuiper]

I really like Joe's response. I would focus on his second recommendation to have the content added to important landing pages (your commercial pages), then 301 the resource page/s to the landing page/s. Or, you could follow Joe's first recommendation and seek to add good 'llinkable' content to appropriate landing pages from here on in. You have a 'good' problem here and if you go about handling the link equity properly, your landing pages will become your authority (resource) pages.