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
-
Site Crawl -> Duplicate Page Content -> Same pages showing up with duplicates that are not
These, for example: | https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php/?utm_campaign=july15&utm_medium=organic&utm_source=blog | 1 | 2 | 29 | 2 | 200 |
Technical SEO | | writezach
| https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php?_ga=1.145821812.1573134750.1440742418 | 1 | 1 | 25 | 2 | 200 |
| https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php?utm_source=tapclicks&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=brightpod-article | 1 | 119 | 40 | 4 | 200 |
| https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php?utm_source=tapclicks&utm_medium=marketplace&utm_campaign=homepage | 1 | 119 | 40 | 4 | 200 |
| https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php?utm_source=blog&utm_campaign=first-3-must-watch-videos | 1 | 119 | 40 | 4 | 200 |
| https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php?_ga=1.159789566.2132270851.1418408142 | 1 | 5 | 31 | 2 | 200 |
| https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php/?utm_source=vocus&utm_medium=PR&utm_campaign=52release | Any suggestions/directions for fixing or should I just disregard this "High Priority" moz issue? Thank you!0 -
What to do with temporary empty pages?
I have a website listing real estate in different areas that are for sale. In small villages, towns, and areas, sometimes there is nothing for sale and therefore the page is completely empty with no content except a and some footer text. I have thousand of landing pages for different areas. For example "Apartments in Tibro" or "Houses in Ljusdahl" and Moz Pro gives me some warnings for "Duplicate Content" on the empty ones (I think it does so because the pages are so empty that they are quite similar). I guess Google could also think bad of my site if I have hundreds or thousands of empty pages even if my total amount of pages are 100,000. So, what to do with these pages for these small cities, towns and villages where there is not always houses for sale? Should I remove them completely? Should I make a 404 when no houses for sale and a 200 OK when there is? Please note that I have totally 100,000+ pages and this is only about 5% of all my pages.
Technical SEO | | marcuslind900 -
How come only 2 pages of my 16 page infographic are being crawled by Moz?
Our Infographic titled "What Is Coaching" was officially launched 5 weeks ago. http://whatiscoaching.erickson.edu/ We set up campaigns in Moz & Google Analytics to track its performance. Moz is reporting No organic traffic and is only crawling 2 of the 16 pages we created. (see first and third attachments) Google Analytics is seeing hundreds of some very strange random pages (see second attachment) Both campaigns are tracking the url above. We have no idea where we've gone wrong. Please help!! 16_pages_seen_in_wordpress.png how_google_analytics_sees_pages.png what_moz_sees.png
Technical SEO | | EricksonCoaching0 -
Should I just have links on my home page or intro to articles
Hi, i am having problems optimizing my home page for the words, lifestyle magazine, online magazine and lifestyle news. my site is here www.in2town.co.uk I am just wondering if i have to much content on the page for google to understand that it is a lifestyle magazine. I am wondering if i should just have the links on the page and no introduction to the articles which i have seen here with a site http://www.femalefirst.co.uk and i am wondering how sites like this are ranking better than ours when they have hardly any content on their home page http://www.nelifestyle.co.uk/
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
http://www.lifestyle.org/
http://www.internationallifestylemagazine.com/ any advice would be most welcome0 -
Dynamic page
I have few pages on my site that are with this nature /locator/find?radius=60&zip=&state=FL I read at Google webmaster that they suggest not to change URL's like this "According to Google's Blog (link below) they are able to crawl the simplified dynamic URL just fine, and it is even encouraged to use a simple dynamic URL ( " It's much safer to serve us the original dynamic URL and let us handle the problem of detecting and avoiding problematic parameters. " ) _http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html _It can also actually lead to a decrease as per this line: " We might have problems crawling and ranking your dynamic URLs if you try to make your urls look static and in the process hide parameters which offer the Googlebot valuable information. "The URLs are already simplified without any extra parameters, which is the recommended structure from Google:"Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
Technical SEO | | ciznerguy
That's our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems" I would love to get some opinions on this also please consider that those pages are not cached by Google for some reason.0 -
Where to put Schema On Page
What part of my page should I put Schema data? Header? Footer? Also All pages? or just home page?
Technical SEO | | bozzie3114 -
404 - page authority?
If in open site explorer my 404 pages have a higer page authority - what benefit would i see in rankings if I 301 redirected those pages to the right page. For example www.site.com/widget is a 404 but has authority according to open site explorer - but the page i see in the serps is www.site.com/widget/ with the / at the end. so what benefit would i see in rankings if I 301 redirected those pages to the right page?
Technical SEO | | DavidS-2820610 -
International Site, flow of page rank?
OK. I'm working on an international site. The site is setup with folders for UK, US, AU e.g www.site.com/UK/index.aspx The root (non folder based) is the international version of the site e.g www.site.com/index.aspx www.site.com/index.aspx has the lions share of links. Therefore, the pages immediately linked from www.site.com/index.aspx have page rank distributed between them. My UK, US and AU home pages are linked via a country selector from the www.site.com/index.aspx page via an aspx redirect page that 301's to the appropriate country home page. Therefore the home pages of UK, US, AU are recieving some of the 'juice' that is coming in to www.site.com/index.aspx (but only a fraction via the redirect links) Am I right in thinking that pages on the international version of the site will have much more potential to rank (because of their 'juice') than the pages on UK, US and AU versions of the site? If so, am I right in thinking that these will tend to rank over the equivalent UK, US and AU versions of the pages in each country version of Google despite having set directory level Geo-targetting in GWT?
Technical SEO | | QubaSEO1