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.
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 and ranking
I have a problem and i have a question on that. Many important keywords and long tail keywords are ranking with the home page url.
Technical SEO | | mazzamz
How can i enrich the home page content without having a bad result and should i try to make the google spider send to more specific page?0 -
Page Rank Flow
I wonder if someone can help me understand clearly page rank flow. If we have a website with a Home page, Services, About and Contact as a very basic website and the page rank will flow to each of those pages from the Home page (i'm not including internal linking between pages or anchor text from the home page content - this is a question purely about home page flow via the main navigation). If the Services page had 3 drop down pages. Would the home page rank also flow to each of these or is it going to the Services page which then distributes it to the three drop down. So instead of Home page rank flowing to 3 pages 33% each - it is flowing to 6 pages 16.6% each. Or is it flowing to 3 pages - 33.3% then the Services pages get a third of 33.3% ->10.1% I know this is simplifying it all a great deal- but it is the basic concept I am trying to grasp on this simple example. Thanks
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
vs.
I have a site that is based in the US but each page has several different versions for different regions. These versions live in folders (/en-us for the US English version, /en-gb for the UK English version, /fr-fr for the French version, etc.). Obviously, the French pages are in French. However, there are two versions of the site that are in English with little variation of the content. The pages all have a tag to indicate the language the page is in. However, there are no <hreflang>tags to indicate that the pages are the same page in two different languages.</hreflang> My question is, do I need to go through and add the <hreflang>tags to each page to reference each other and identify to Google that these are duplicate content issues, but different language versions of the same content? Or, will Google figure that our from the tag?</hreflang>
Technical SEO | | InterCall0 -
If I want clean up my URLs and take the "www.site.com/page.html" and make it "www.site.com/page" do I need a redirect?
If I want clean up my URLs and take the "www.site.com/page.html" and make it "www.site.com/page" do I need a redirect? If this scenario requires a 301 redirect no matter what, I might as well update the URL to be a little more keyword rich for the page while I'm at it. However, since these pages are ranking well I'd rather not lose any authority in the process and keep the URL just stripped of the ".html" (if that's possible). Thanks for you help! [edited for formatting]
Technical SEO | | Booj0 -
Google showing https:// page in search results but directing to http:// page
We're a bit confused as to why Google shows a secure page https:// URL in the results for some of our pages. This includes our homepage. But when you click through it isn't taking you to the https:// page, just the normal unsecured page. This isn't happening for all of our results, most of our deeper content results are not showing as https://. I thought this might have something to do with Google conducting searches behind secure pages now, but this problem doesn't seem to affect other sites and our competitors. Any ideas as to why this is happening and how we get around it?
Technical SEO | | amiraicaew0 -
Unavoidable duplicate page
Hi, I have an issue where I need to duplicate content on a new site that I am launching. Visitors to the site need to think that product x is part of two different services. e.g. domain.com/service1/product-x domain.com/service2/product-x Re-writing content for product x for each service section is not an option but possibly I could get over that only one product-x page is indexed by search engines. What's the best way to do this? Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks, Stuart
Technical SEO | | Stuart260 -
Does google like Category pages or pages with lots of Products on them?
We are having an issue with getting Google to rank the page we want. To have this page http://www.jakewilson.com/c/52/-/346/Cruiser-Motorcycle-Tires rank for the key word Cruiser Motorcycle Tires; however, this page http://www.jakewilson.com/t/52/-/343/752/Cruiser-Motorcycle-Tires is ranking instead and it has less links and page authority according to site explorer and it is farther down in the hierarchy. I am wondering if google just likes pages that have actual products on them instead of a page leading to the page with all the products. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | DoRM0 -
Backlinks to unique login pages
Hi There, This has turned out to be slightly long winded! Congrats to anyone who manages to follow what I am on about and cheers to anyone that can help! The company I work for has several hundred backlinks from customer sites (authority sites) that link to their unique login pages (e.g. customer.oursitesname.com/unique-identifier). From these pages they can access our learning platform. For maximum SEO benefits we have been trying to think of a way to get these customers to link to our start page. This is what we have come up with. Customers would link to us using a URL with this format www.oursitesname.com/#customer-unique-identifier. (I have read somewhere that Google “ignores” everything after a #). This URL would then cause a Jscript pop-up or drop-down to open. The pop-up or drop-down would be hidden for the normal user and only be visible for users that visit over the unique URL. The pop-up or drop-down would be unique for each customer (mainly for branding purposes). The pop-up or drop-down would contain signup/login fields. So now to my question, will this get us in trouble with Google? Is there a better solution than this? Are we over thinking it and should we just do something like this: www.oursitesname.com/customer-login/unique -identifier and set www.oursitesname.com/customer-login/ as the canonical? Does the Google bot get suspicious of hundreds of canonical tags pointing back to the one URL? Thanks in advance! Henry
Technical SEO | | hnydnn0