Homepage Vs. Inner Page Backlink Building?
-
If I'm trying to rank multiple inner pages, when does strengthening the homepage become more productive than strengthening the inner pages themselves? Is there a strategy to this?
For example, maybe you build up a few dozen backlinks to each inner page, and then focus all your efforts on the homepage?
Because, from my understanding, strengthening the homepage will go a long way towards helping your inner pages rank. Is that correct?
-
Strengthening the home page with inbound branded links, and mixed commercialized / brand links from editorial / high quality sources builds authority, which as Perfect007 mentioned, distributes 'weight' throughout the website.
This improved domain authority tends to move relevant associated topics within the website up in rankings more than non-related areas. For example, the more tightly knit the homepage is to the categories that comprise it, the more inbound link building to the homepage impacts those pages.
At the same time, link building to strategic inner pages moves the needle as well, and reinforces authority to associated related sub categories and 'sister' categories in the website.
As a basic rule of thumb, competition being equal - the further apart your inner categories are insofar as relations, the more authority you need to build at the base level (root, homepage) in order to move inner categories forward.
Hope this helps.
-
yes your understanding is correct, building links to your home page will increase your domain authority over time and domain authority is defined as (paraphrasing) 'the likelihood of new content on your site to rank'.
That being said, every site owner has pages they'd like to showcase and more importantly, ensure that the page is getting good SERP placement. For that deep linking is critical. If you don't deep link, Google will sometimes display your home page as the url for a keyword that you'd have preferred go to an internal page.
For instance if you want your home page to rank for 'Widgets' and you want MySIte.com/purple-widgets/ to rank for 'Purple Widgets', your better off deep linking with 'purple widget' related (for link diversity purposes) anchor text to your interior pages. This will help you make sure your home page doesn't rank for 'Purple Widgets'.
-
I believe if you are building links the right way and promoting your brand as well you will see links coming to your home page automatically mostly because of your brand name visibility in the target market.
I believe you should focus on building links to pages that contain quality no matter if they are inner pages, non commercial pages or anything else...
-
Home page backlinks will distribute the link juice on whole inner page. Most of the time home page gets backlinks because of the most prompt page of the website. But it also depends on the most relevant link concept. If your inner page is best relevant for getting any backlink then you should choose inner one.
But most of the backlink provider resources(directory, forum signature etc.) prefer home page of websites.
-
It has a lot to do with the kind of website that you have.
In general you want to get a lot of links to the pages that you want to get found on. (blog posts, product pages etcetera)
But in general the homepage gets the most links because when people see your website and they like it the homepage is the most logical URL to link to.Strengthening the home page will be helpful to your site because the homepage should be your content hub. You can find more information about content hubs, website architecture and a lot more here: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-rank
Hope i answered your question
Let me know if you have any other questions or if i was unclear about something.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
All on-page and off-page tips are appreciated
http://www.business-baltics.com what would you change in terms of on page seo? Should all categories have a longer introduction text + an image that reflect that category? Most companies don't have any text in their profile for example: http://www.business-baltics.com/baltmar-trade-ou-503456 All content is paid (if they don't pay they don't get a chance to introduce themselves) ... how would you improve the rankings of companies like that? By the way I cannot change that, it is the company policy. Should we make a chance for people to "vote" for a company that google would have the stars next to all companies. Would that help to get more visits from Google? How should we rank better in Yandex and Baidu? (Baidu sent 1 visitor in last month). And yes we have the chinese language... Yandex is improving but we are not getting the results we want. Thank you for all your tips.
Link Building | | MarkasKR0 -
When do backlinks start helping?
I have been working hard at getting quality backlinks but I had a lot of keywords slip in rankings this week. This may because I have been extremely busy for a week and haven't added a lot of content to my site. But I thought the backlinks would be helping. How long does it take backlinks to start boosting your site and what results should I see? I am focusing on getting backlinks from a site with a PR of 7. The others have a PR of 4-5. They are the BEST sites in my niche.
Link Building | | dealblogger0 -
Link over-building?
Hello all. One of the first things we do for our clients is to claim their local listings, include them on a set of selected directories (8-10), and blog directories (5), if applicable. Since they will all be linked to the client site, could doing all of this at once run us into problems with unnatural link growth? Thanks! Frank
Link Building | | FrankSweeney0 -
Google is no longer ranking home page but sub page lower, why?
We were ranking on page 2 and number 4 for the key word motorcycle tires. Google was ranking our home page jakewilson.com; however, we have been adding new content to our site and doing some internal linking. We pointed some links about motorcycle tires to http://www.jakewilson.com/cl/52/Motorcycle-Tires and now that page ranks but on page 3 not 2. Any thoughts?
Link Building | | DoRM0 -
Definition of a backlink
Quick question, would you define backlinking - as just external links or would you also say its also internal links within a site. So are internal links, be also considered backlinks? Mark
Link Building | | monster990 -
Backlinks, how do you get them?
Recently, I listed our site on a few directory's which I deemed as not spammy and had good domain authority (competitors were using these). This was about 2 weeks ago and have not seen them come up as a backlink using open site explorer? I was wondering whether i'm missing something out here or does it take longer than 2 weeks to gain a backlink from a website? Thanks in advance.
Link Building | | PeterAllen910 -
BackLinks Less than other software
Why Domains BackLinks to my sites are less than link in google webmaster tools or in the other software? In google web master tools i find 323 domains backlink, in other online software the number of domain links is similar. There are great problem when i must download the backlink to upload in other seo software for different analysis, example buzzstream Thank You.
Link Building | | agasystem0 -
How to pick the right keywords for backlink building in a Huge site
Hi there, I'm running a coupons/discounts web site, with more than 1 millon page indexed. The website niche is crearly related to Coupons, Discounts, Deals, but those discounts may apply to hundreds of different categories. Currently we are getting 15K organic visits a day. Every time we have to write blog articles to increase backlinking, the same question came up. Should we target our niche keyowrds (which are very competitive) or should we pick long tail keyword (3-4 words) to be more specific ? The 70-80% of the organic traffic we receive every day came from long tail keywords, for which we never did any offert to rank with. This 70-80% traffic lands into internal pages. So basically the question is: should I keep backlinking the home page to get more juice on my domain, which will organically flows to the long tail landing pages ? Or should I write hundreds of articles targetting directly the long tail ? I think that targetting the long tail will cost me a lot of effort, i.e. for a particular long tail google search (with 4 or more keywords) I get 10 visitis a day, ranking in postion 3. If I made a lot of effort to rank in the first position for that long tail keyword, I may only get 50 visits a day, so for duplicating my daily visit amount I should do that work for thousandths of keywords, which seems, to not have much sense. So, should we target the domain and lets the rank flows from there, or should we point to thousandths of internal long tail landing pages ? I hope I made my self clear enough. Thanks in advance
Link Building | | martincad0