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
-
Use Internal Search pages as Landing Pages?
Hi all Just a general discussion question about Internal Search pages and using them for SEO. I've been looking to "noindexing / follow" them, but a lot of the Search pages are actually driving significant traffic & revenue. I've over 9,000 search pages indexed that I was going to remove, but after reading this article (https://www.oncrawl.com/technical-seo/seo-internal-search-results/) I was wondering if any of you guys have had success using these pages for SEO, like with using auto-generated content. Or any success stories about using the "noindexing / follow"" too. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Frankie-BTDublin0 -
Discrepancy in actual indexed pages vs search console
Hi support, I checked my search console. It said that 8344 pages from www.printcious.com/au/sitemap.xml are indexed by google. however, if i search for site:www.printcious.com/au it only returned me 79 results. See http://imgur.com/a/FUOY2 https://www.google.com/search?num=100&safe=off&biw=1366&bih=638&q=site%3Awww.printcious.com%2Fau&oq=site%3Awww.printcious.com%2Fau&gs_l=serp.3...109843.110225.0.110430.4.4.0.0.0.0.102.275.1j2.3.0....0...1c.1.64.serp..1.0.0.htlbSGrS8p8 Could you please advise why there is discrepancy? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Printcious0 -
Log files vs. GWT: major discrepancy in number of pages crawled
Following up on this post, I did a pretty deep dive on our log files using Web Log Explorer. Several things have come to light, but one of the issues I've spotted is the vast difference between the number of pages crawled by the Googlebot according to our log files versus the number of pages indexed in GWT. Consider: Number of pages crawled per log files: 2993 Crawl frequency (i.e. number of times those pages were crawled): 61438 Number of pages indexed by GWT: 17,182,818 (yes, that's right - more than 17 million pages) We have a bunch of XML sitemaps (around 350) that are linked on the main sitemap.xml page; these pages have been crawled fairly frequently, and I think this is where a lot of links have been indexed. Even so, would that explain why we have relatively few pages crawled according to the logs but so many more indexed by Google?
Technical SEO | | ufmedia0 -
Internal link structure, find out if there are any internal links to this page
When i use this url in open site explorer it says that there are no internal links:
Technical SEO | | wilcoXXL
http://goo.gl/d2s6tJ
Page Authority is also 1, it should be higher of there are any internal links to it right? But i am very sure there are links to this url on my website. For example on this URL:
http://goo.gl/ucixRH How certain can i be of this? Because if i can be very certain, than we have a internal linkstructure problem on our entire site i believe.0 -
Can up a page
I do my best to optimize the on-page parameters for my page www.lkeria.com/AADL-logement-Algerie.php for the kw "aadl" but i can't understand what Ii'm doing wrong (i desapear 2 mounths ago). The page is optimize (title, description, h1, h2 etc.) few links with different ancers, but google put a spamy site www[dot]aadl[dot]biz in top 3 ratheer my page. Can you give me some advice to fix this issue? What I am doing wrong? Tanks in advance
Technical SEO | | lkeria0 -
How Does Google's "index" find the location of pages in the "page directory" to return?
This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specific: Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory") Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched. These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory" These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" knows the location of relevant pages in the "page directory". The keyword entries in the "index" point to the "page directory" somehow. I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls. Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website (and would the keywords in the "index" point to these urls)? For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache? The reason I want to discuss this is to know the effects of changing a pages url by understanding how the search process works better.
Technical SEO | | reidsteven750 -
How to redirect home.co.uk to home.co.uk/
Hi, We recently moved to shopify and noticed that our home page is now .co.uk/ (with backslash) instead of .co.uk As both are returning 200 ok I am concerned that this could cause a duplicate content issue. Could anyone please advice on the best way to fix this? Thanks, Paul
Technical SEO | | devoted2vintage0 -
302 Redirect of Home Page - Lost Link Juice?
I've got a new client whose site is set up to redirect the home page to another URL, like www.example.com, redirecting to www.example.com/home/, using a 302 redirect. Am I correct in assuming that links pointing directly to www.example.com are not passing their full value because it is being redirected with a 302 rather than 301? (In a nutshell, I want to make sure this resource is still accurate: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection)
Technical SEO | | kpclaypool0