Oylinki

Everyone knows how important it is to get links from other sites…  What few basic SEO guides fail to give a lot of mention to is internal links. Internal links are one of the fastest way to make the most of your existing PageRank, and funnel it to the landing pages that need it the most.

It is a misconception that you can optimize a large ’site’. From the perspective of internal links, its actually not good to think about it that way. Many pages aren’t based around content that people are searching for. Some companies have entire sub-domains for customer support which is not positioned for search behavior. Think of optimizing your most important pages, and using your site to accomplish that task.

Clearly, non-essential pages should not be ‘optimized’ as much as other pages. In fact, these pages are best utilized by sacrificing all of their pagerank to one priority page, or target page.  In this way, it acts as a booster to the pagerank of a critical page.

Search engines use the internal linking emphasis to determine a measure of importance of the documents within a set of documents.

The concept is to prioritize your pages. How many pages you can prioritize will depend on how many pages you have. It will generally be 10% or lower for sites above 50 pages. So, for a 50 page site, 5 target pages are chosen to receive links from the other pages.

Non-target pages from each site will link to the target page, and no other page. Use some web technology to make any other links on the page not appear as links to the search engine such as nofollow tags, Javascript, or redirects to mask any other actual links.

Using this method also makes it extremely easy to exchange links with your other domains, or perhaps a fellow domainer.

For instance, lets say I have a 100-page site, and have chosen to link one or more of my target pages with a partner, or another of my own own sites (hosted on another C-class IP address).

How to best interlink to maximize the mutual benefit?

The quick answer is to take all of my booster pages, that is, pages not isolated as priority targets for absorbing pagerank, should links to one of my targets, and also one of my  partners target pages.

Depending on how people manage their sites, this could entail a lot of work.

The great thing is that, there is a simpler way.

If myself as well as my partner have already utilized our booster pages to link only to individual target pages to pass the most PageRank to them. This scenario makes it very simple to have a win-win link situation between these two target pages.

The target pages need merely link together. My target page links to my partner’s, my partner’s target page links back to me. This simple link exchange makes it easier to maximize the pagerank transfer between two sets of pages.

Why only one link to the target page? If someone randomly surfing the web, (what search bots do) is more likely to come across certain pages – because there are more links to them – then certainly these pages are seen as more prevalent, and more important.

Linking to other pages dilutes the vote you can do for a target page.

If you link to no pages at all, the Google algorithm for assigning PageRank will assume that after coming to your site, the ‘random surfer’ will choose any site on the whole internet at random.

So, catch those theoretical Googlebot visits, and boost your algorithmic score, and redundantly links to your target pages, to the exclusion of other linking pages.

Note, it is still important to have portions of your site that do link to outside sources for purposes of co-citation, and overall quality. This applies generally for pages not used for such purposes.

Anyone wishing more theoretical support for the above ideas ought refer to “Link Spam Alliances” in part by by Hector Garcia Molina – the faculty advisor to the Google barrons.

The key to internal linking is to focus!

Source: Matt Robson writing for DomainNews.com – February 27th, 2008