Backlinks to home page vs internal page
-
Hello,
What is the point of getting a large amount of backlinks to internal pages of an ecommerce site? Although it would be great to make your articles (for example) strong, isn't it more important to build up the strength of the home page.
All of My SEO has had a long term goal of strengthening the home page, with just enough backlinks to internal pages to have balance, which is happening naturally. The home page of our main site is what comes up on tons of our keyword searches since it is so strong.
Please let me know why so much effort is put into getting backlinks to internal pages.
Thank you,
-
Thanks Ryan, you seem to always have good information. I researched it and I agree with your comments.
-
Ryan, I agree with this. I did some thinking and searching and you seem to be right on. I'll pass pagrank to the home page via stronger internal pages. Thank you.
-
Ryan, I agree with this. I did some thinking and searching and you seem to be right on. I'll pass pagrank to the home page via stronger internal pages. Thank you.
-
There isnt really any specific documentation on how much pagerank is passed in certain situations. Historically this technique is call pagerank sculpting, and the direct pagerank passed value is being de-emphasized as of late.
Here was an answer about a similar issue posted by Rand and the SEOmoz team a while ago: http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/15353/internal-links-and-page-rank
The value comes in with a large volume of those "tiny" keywords. Structure you r site so a lot of the tiny ones link to your homepage to keep the homepage ranking well, but only link off of your homepage to a handful of important pages (like if you had a page for each of those 5 or 6 good keywords).
-
Based on your prior reply I believe by "tiny" you mean they are long tail keywords.
In that case, yes.
-
Ryan, is this true even if all of the internal keywords are tiny?
-
OK, so how much pagerank will be passed to the home page from a strong internal page? Could you give specific examples, and if possible, documentation? I believe you are correct, I just need to get a good feel for how much pagerank is passed. I forgot to mention that there are about 5 or 6 good keywords in our main niche, and the rest of the keywords are pretty tiny.
-
Please let me know why so much effort is put into getting backlinks to internal pages.
Because they are out to kickass and make money by getting internal pages dominant in their niche.
All of My SEO has had a long term goal of strengthening the home page, with just enough backlinks to internal pages to have balance, which is happening naturally. The home page of our main site is what comes up on tons of our keyword searches since it is so strong.
How many people do you have working on this? Imagine the result if you had twice as many?
-
The primary reason to have links to internal pages is to help search engines locate your content and promote it's rankings. If you only link to your home page your PA of your more important pages will suffer.
Let's assume you sell various products and one of them is Nike WingedFoot sneakers. You provide the page as one of the 5000 products you offer and do not have links to the page. One of your competitors writes a fantastic article on how this pair of sneakers is the best thing and can make you jump higher, run faster, etc. He obtains links directly to this page. All things being equal, he will outrank you. Even without writing the great article if he gets the links and everything else is equal, he will outrank you for any similar search.
EDIT: I was ninja'd on the response by "the other Ryan". We are in agreement but worded things a bit differently.
-
There isnt a perfect ratio, but for larger sites it is very important to get a large number of backlinks to internal pages. It helps with the overall "Domain Authority". If your site is structured well, then the "seo sculpting" internally will help boost the homepage. You should make sure to utilize internal links back to the homepage or important high-level pages.
For instance, lets say you have 10 backlinks. If they all go to your homepage, your homepage could have a nice SEO value with a pagerank of 5. But your interior pages dont have much pagerank or seo value, and therefor the rest of your site doesnt get ranked well.
In contrast, lets say 8 out of the 10 links go to internal pages, and those internal pages all have a small pagerank, and those pages all link back to your homepage with important keywords, it will pass a bunch of that seo value up to your homepage at the same time of increasing the value of your internal pages. Its a better way to get your whole site ranking, rather than just homepage.
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
-
Home page not indexed by any search engines
We are currently having an issue with our homepage not being indexed by any search engines. We recently transferred our domain to Godaddy and there was an issue with the DNS. When we typed our url into Google like this "https://www.mysite.com" nothing from the site came up in the search results, only our social media profiles. When we typed our url into Google like this "mysite.com" we were sent to a GoDaddy parked page. We've been able to fix the issue over at Godaddy and the url "mysite.com" is not being redirected to "https://mysite.com" but, Google and the other search engines have yet to respond. I would say our fix has been in place for at least 72 hours. Do I need to give this more time? I would think that at lease one search engine would have picked up on the change by now and would start indexing the site properly.
Technical SEO | | bcglf1 -
Crawl Test Report only shows home page and no inner site pages?
Hi, My site is [removed] When I first tried to set up a new campaign for the site, I received the error: Roger has detected a problem: We have detected that the root domain [removed] does not respond to web requests. Using this domain, we will be unable to crawl your site or present accurate SERP information. I then ran a Crawl Test per the FAQ. The SEOmoz crawl report only shows my home page URL and does not have any inner site pages. This is a Joomla site. What is the problem? Thanks! Dave
Technical SEO | | crave810 -
404 page for webshop vs 302 redirect
Hi everybody Im the owner of a webshop and we have implemented that products that are not instock are disabled from the shop. My problem is that i have a lot of 404 pages, that right now get redirected to the front page, when the item are not instock. This is because it would hurt the conversion rate if they got a standard 404 page. Customers dont know what a 404 and would click back and choose another competitor. Its really hard to find out what are the best solution and what are not a downrank at google. This has been running like this for 2 years and cant see any negative in the solution regarding seo and so on, What are your thoughts? Christian Hansen Denmark
Technical SEO | | noerdar0 -
Duplicate Page Content
I've got several pages of similar products that google has listed as duplicate content. I have them all set up with rel="prev" and rel="next tags telling google that they are part of a group but they've still got them listed as duplicates. Is there something else I should do for these pages or is that just a short falling of googles webmaster tools? One of the pages: http://www.jaaronwoodcountertops.com/wood-countertop-gallery/walnut-countertop-9.html
Technical SEO | | JAARON0 -
Problem generating backlinks
Hello everyone, Over the past couple of days I have been using a variety of different free and paid programs to check how many backlinks I have. I have used at least 15 different ones, SEOmoz is the newest and am awaiting those results. All but one of those programs have said that I have 0 backlinks. The one said I have 11. The thing is...over the past month I have submitted my site to over 500 PR0 directories, 250+ PR3-PR7 directories, have made well over 75 article submissions to over 20 websites(almost all of them were approved and up and running, and some of these websites have a PR of 7), a couple dozen Press Releases, set up profiles linking to my site on over 50 forums, set up profiles linking to my site on a variety of different Web 2.0 sites, and still nothing. I have been doing this every day for over a month. Anyone have any ide?
Technical SEO | | tarik30010 -
Paginated Home Page Duplicates on Wordpress Sites
A number of my websites created on WP are displaying duplicate home pages with these types of urls. http://www.example.com/page/10/ http://www.example.com/page/11/ http://www.example.com/page/12/ I found these duplicates using the site:search command. Basically, put in any number and the Home Page opens. With the above mentioned url structure. Any idea on why they are created, how they can be stopped and what kind of an impact they would have in terms of SEO and the penalty that comes with duplicate content.
Technical SEO | | AsadMemon1 -
Internal Linking
Where is the best information on internal linking. I'm so confused and everything I read says something different. Ahhhh Thanks
Technical SEO | | meardna770 -
Non-www home page indexed, but www for rest of site
Hi there, grateful for any ideas on why this is happening: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:www.vitispr.com vs http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:vitispr.com Google seems to be indexing and caching vitispr.com for our home page but the www. versions for everything else. As you can see the second query finds the home page. Any ideas why that might be? Other info that might be relevant: non-www etc. are all 301'd to www versions. moved domains/urls etc. around in March of this year and for a week or we were redirecting to the non-www version webmaster tools says 'www' preferred Thanks!
Technical SEO | | JaspalX0