It’s the internal links, stupid….
July 19, 2007
Everybody on the net seems to be link crazy these days. People whoring themselves out for a link here and a link there. Much like politicians selling themselves for votes (great analogy, now that I think on it…), they think of bold and even risky (I don’t use the tired old black hat and white hat cliches because life is a business decision–not a cowboy show.) schemes to pull in external links in order to impress Google.
When all is said and done, it matters how many external links you got, true. BUT as was said in a recent US presidential election, It’s the Economy, stupid. When the economy is working right, the votes will come. In the SEO world, It’s the internal linking structure that pushes the link love around and when it is properly optimized, provides the best SERPS for the amount of external inbound links you have.
John Scott addressed it in April of last year. I read it at the time, thought I got it, and filed it away “for future use”…the future is now and it is time to pay attention. With external links becoming increasingly valuable, and the time that it takes to build them more costly in terms of time (read: money), it only makes sense that the person making the best use internally of those external resources wins. It was true then, but it is both true and CRITICAL now.
Jim Boykin’s treatise of internal linking was a damn fine look at the basics of it and his tool is pretty cool as well. He offers some good suggestions on where to start.. Allow me to throw in some specific ideas on it as well…
Defensible Internal Linking
1) THINK about your Nav bar and other links from the index page. PLAN which pages and ONLY which pages are going to be the ones which rank for you.
2) If you don’t need to rank with it, put enough internal links to it to keep it out of the supplemental index, but CONSERVE where you don’t need the juice. Having a site with all equally strong pages link juice wise gets you NOWHERE if none of them get you to your goals. Remember that it takes more now than before to stay out of the supplemental index. Using proper internal linking helps you spend less time whoring for external links.
Methods of spreading the link love:
- Nav Bars limited to pages which you expect to rank.
- Ummm..Sitemaps
- Directories
- Glossaries
- Archives
- Breadcrumbs (properly designed)
- Appropriate content linking (you can link to references in your own site just as well as other people’s. You are an authority, right?
Check out your ratio of internal links to external ones. I have seen VERY successful sites with almost 15 times as many internals as externals. (You can find this with Google Webmaster Tools) Most sites are FAR from that number. Most have far less internal links than external inbound links. While in my opinion the STRUCTURE is far more important than the number (read that twice-it is important), the idea is that most webmasters spend far too little time worrying about the internal links. They are too busy trying to buy, beg, borrow or bootleg the next external link, only to put it to marginal use.
There are only so many external links to be had without making yourself a huge spam target above the radar…let’s practice link strength conservation and good management. (grin)
Have a great day!
Hi Eric,
I like your blog and I like this post. I am certainly NOT an SEO expert, but, I don’t think that you have to necessarily be one to get the fundamentals correct. I have had some decent success with taking a common sense approach to optimizing my website and it seems to be working well. Thinking about what you said about internal linking opens up a can of worms that takes you into exactly you are trying to accomplish with your website and helping visitors find what they are looking for using the search engines as a vehicle to achieve that goal. Take my website for example, which is about Atlanta real estate. Atlanta is big. Too big for a single webpage. So I break it down into individual cities and then further into the segments that I want to talk about. All of it is about Atlanta real estate so it naturally should link back to that somehow and other parts relate to each other so they should be linked back together so everything flows, or, makes sense to users and SE’s alike. If you want the SE’s to act a certain way, you have to tell them how you want them to act. Internal linking is critical for this. It also helps to keep spiders spiraling through webpages as they follow links creating a picture to them that all is relevant and worthy of the regular index, not the suplemental index. Good post. Now I’m off to look through my website to see how I can make it talk to the SE’s better!
Great insights and guidance, Eric. Sites that rise fast, typically fall fast. Planning for long term ranking is the ticket. No wonder you are #1 for Louisville real estate!
Great advice, Eric. People spend all their time trying to get EXTERNAL links – and then when you look at their site, they’ve gotten sloppy with their own link juice power between their pages. Instead of using .PDF files, convert it over to HTML, link back to your home page, etc, etc.
Eric – great post, just stumbled across it. A couple months after this post, Matt Cutts acknowledged the use of the “no follow” attribute as a viable way to channel pagerank to your most desired pages. This post was on SEOmoz. What is your take on this? My SEO colleagues and I often debate about this practice but if Cutts said that it’s a reasonable practice that won’t be punished by Google – I’m tempted to give it a try…
Using no follows as a way to move the internal link juice around is a good practice IMO. I try not to focus on what Matt says as opposed to trying to abide by the principles of Google’s guidelines whilst getting MY job done (read: getting to the top for a long profitable run…)
Knowing HOW to move the link juice around in a way to get you the most possible exposure requires experience…part of what I have done for some of my clients in the past.
Pleased to meet you, Brad…cannot remember if we’ve talked before elsewhere (maybe REW–can’t remmber anyway…welcome! Glad you found me!
Best
Eric
Great post, Eric! And thanks for the link to Jim Boykin’s article. I learned several new things reading this article that I will definitely start implementing on my website.
Thanks again for sharing your advise as well.
Jonathan
Hi Eric,
Nice post. I am wondering since I have a REW custom IDX and so does one of my competitors if you think that the fact that the competitor has main navigation on search page as well all the detailed results pages? What do you think Eric?
ok, that thought did not get finished. the question was do you think that the fact that the other website has custom IDX from REW same as me, but has main nav on the search page as all the detailed results pages, where as REW for some reason did not do that when creating mine, is helping that competitors website valt ahead of mine as well as other very well established websites for most any search that site is going after???
Jim