Internal Linking Structure

A few years ago it was thought that if your internal pages had fewer links throughout your site, and your homepage was linked on every internal page, then your homepage would receive greater link juice. Now I have a seo telling me that all the internal links on the left menu bar of my homepage should be on every internal page. By doing that will I be losing link juice to my homepage or not?

Thanks!

Hi there

From a user-friendliness point of view, I'd recommned having a good navigation throughout your site.

What you can do is make the links "nofollow" which will stop the loss of "link juice".

Hope this helps!

Close..... but then you went off track

Navigation bars are good for users. Go with that if it makes sense. If I have to backtrack all the way back to the homepage to get to a different section of your site, then I'm likely to go back one step further to my google results and go to the next listing....

The use of nofollow does not, however, stop you from losing link juice. It basically kills it dead in the water. Example: you have 10 linkjuice "points" (they don't really exist, so don't ask a definition), and 10 links out of the page, it is safe to assume each link passes along 1 point.

If you put a nofollow tag on 5 of those links, each link still only gets 1 point, so you'd only be passing along 5 points, and 5 would pretty much disappear.

Don't worry so much about re-routing linkjuice back to your homepage. Most of the links you acquire will go to the homepage (until you become a huge resource with lots of authority, then they'll start being deeper links), so most of your external linkjuice will land there.

Once you have enough juice to be regularly crawled & indexed, what you'll need to worry more about is relevance, which is passed through anchor text and link paths - in other words, if your homepage is being crawled well enough, then you need to focus more on the rest of your site (and the nav bar would help you do so).

Yup that is why the implementation is largely a mess. These novote links still leak, to combat that you need to resort to inaccessible cloaking techniques with iframes, flash or javascript.

I now have transparent clickable flash files, that I overlay the usernames with. Url gets passed via flashvar. That way a blogpost with 100 comments doesn't have 100 nofollow links diluting your juice. It has 100 flashfiles that link a new window on click. I feel so dirty.

Also, Cutts said again:

"
if affected by the MayDay update make sure you publish quality content that the users are gonna like:

- content that uses editorial descretion
- unique content
- user generated content (stuff that is not available anywhere else)
"

Countdown to content farms using comment bots on their own websites, to create 10-20 unique lowish quality comments on every (scraped) article.

...sigh...implementation of any kind of internal pagerank sculpting is difficult, time consuming and for the most part, a waste of time it appears....

go to the Google area on youtube to read what Matt has to say on same...then filter that advice thru your "google BS filter" and decide what you can and can not do...

oh. a trip to seomoz to research same would help too....



Jim

Very good comments, all. Thank You! So the answer to my question is that the seo gave me good advice as to navigating my site but bad advice as to moving higher in the serps. The latter is what I'm looking for as the site is 12 years old and just recently moved off the first page for my keyword.

I just added two videos to the website. Any suggestions as to what to do with them to help my serps? I created a new page and placed both videos on that new page. Submitted the videos to about 10 different video places.

Currently the site has over 200 unique content pages (150 are indexed). I'm creating articles, submitting them, and doing blog comments. Doesn't seem to move me at all. About 10 of the 200 pages receive external links. Should I be sending external links via articles and blog comments to these other pages that currently contain no external links instead of to my homepage? Will that give me more "authority" and raise my serps? Will getting the non-indexed pages indexed raise my serps?

The guy who has been #1 for years has a website where none of his internal pages are html but rather go to separate individual folders. For instance on my site internal pages look like keyword.com, keyword.com/keyword1.html, keyword.com/keyword2.html, keyword.com/keyword3.html. His website is structured keyword.com, keyword.com/keyword1/, keyword.com/keyword2/, keyword.com/keyword3/. Wassup with that? Google must like it as he's ahead of Wiki. Any comments?

You are not gonna win the war, by removing your persistent site navigation in an effort to up the PR of your deeper pages.

For SEO:
- PR flows, it also flows back. Pages don't lose PR.
- Persistant subnavigation is perfect for a good internal linking: linking to the pages within your site that are topically/structurally related.
- The quality of your visitor (or his/her goodwill) will relate to their conversion rates. Like Jsteele said, you might get him on your site, you lose him just as easy by destroying their goodwill with a unnavigationable/confusing site.

For usability:
- The word "persistant" should tell you enough.

There are some legit reasons to remove persistant navigation on websites:
On a checkout page, landing page, sign-up page or very rare cases the homepage, removing it can lessen the distraction and up conversion rates.

PR-manipulation for rank gain is not one of them. I would give the same advice as your guy: keep persistant navigation and be open and transparent to both user and googlebot about your site hyrarchy. You can also place the navigation at the bottom of the code and absolutely position it in the sidebar. That way its weight will be less, but still there, maybe a good balanced choice.

Put each video on a seperate page, give a description and optimise page titles, then submit a Google Video Sitemap to get:
- a slight (temporary?) preference / higher ranking for videos
- a very rich snippet with a video thumbnail

Check in Google analytics how many of those pages get visitors from search. That is part of visible index. The site: operator doesnt work correctly.


First check if they really arent in index.
Authority comes from authority domains, not from deeplinks.
it might raise other pages if they are linked from the non-indexed pages and topically related. But not by too much. You do increase your visibility in serps, by having more pages in index.

Both are just fine, extensions dont matter that much at all. Except if you use: .exe as an extension, everything else is fine:
/
.html
(nothing)
.php
.asp
.aspx
.font

I personally prefer adding a trailing slash and consistantly employ that throughout the site. I wouldn't change from .html if that was already there. If they outrank wikipedia its because of links from authority domains and good unique content on the subject, not file extensions.

OK, got it. Thanks!


Google Webmaster Tools told me about 50 pages weren't indexed.


I've never understood this. How do you become an "authority domain?" How do you find authority domains? How do you know that a domain is an authority? Is it guesswork or is there some kind of designation?

Yeah ok. Are these the urls indexed next to the sitemap (compared to total submitted urls)? Im not sure these are entirely accurate too (some pages might have been in index already).

The point of checking: Search sent x visits to y pages, is that getting a page in the Google index is easy. Getting it in the index in a location where it counts, meaning the listing sends visitors, is what is important. You ever had your search results listed in Google index? You could have 10k pages of search results listed in Index, all scoring below position 999. These could just as well not be in the index, because they never get clicked on.



http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-domain-authority-page-authority-metrics
http://vimeo.com/4084630
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-algorithm-pretty-charts-math-stuff
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

If CNN posts a news message or a blog on blogspot posts a message, the CNN message will have lots more authority. If the CNN article links to the blogspot site, it will give its authority vote to that site. How that exactly translates in calculations/designations/how to become CNN, requires some study.

In short:
"
Domain Authority predicts how well a web page will rank on a domain. The higher the Domain Authority, the greater the potential for an individual page on that domain to rank well.
"

OK, I'm still trying to flesh out where to put my energy to get back onto the first page for my homepage for my main keyword. What you are saying above kinda makes sense to me. I think you are saying that I should take all the pages that get no hits and optimize them for keywords that will show those pages in serps where they might generate some hits. More hits to internal pages coming from these internal pages ranking high on lesser known keywords will bring a rise to my homepage serps for my main keywords. Yes?

Okay my reply will probably get peoples backs up, but here goes.

When designing your navigation do it with your users in mind first and foremost. It's all very good having a high ranking site but if it doesn't convert it's pretty useless.

From an SEO point of view our navigation may not be the best, but it works for our customers and so we get the conversions.

Why would it get anyone's backs up? It's already been said by DerekJansen, jsteele823, and Jesus Nofollow. Thanks for repeating it.

You just never know.

Hi i am new here bit can i ask how important is internal linking for seo and and reaching page one on google

Before you do anything you need to work out exactly which pages are getting traffic and which are not. Then work out which pages you would like to rank in the SERPs.

When retrieving pages to match a search query, Google looks at the individual page, rather than the domain - if it is supported by internal links, or external links, it will rank. If it is unsupported, it won't rank, no matter how strong the home page.

You need to start building external links to the particular pages you want to rank, and the keyword that you anchor those links on must be the one you want that particular page to rank, not what you want the homepage to rank for.

Regarding internal linking, your main goal is to make sure users can navigate your site with ease. The page they want should not be more than two clicks from the home page, and they should also be able to explore your site easily from any page. If users can navigate your site with ease, chances are the bots will do so easily too.

It might be worth getting your spouse or other non-tech person to navigate your site and see whether they find it easy to do so or not. Let the pagerank flow freely through the site. the only pages you need to no-follow are things like privacy pages, terms and conditions, legal stuff.

There is a guy called Leslie Rhodie who wrote the definitive (free) ebook on internal linking called "Dynamic Linking". Google to find it, but it's well worth the read.