Does Linking to Internal Pages Help the Site Overall?

Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi

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Does Linking to Internal Pages Help the Site Overall?

MrFewkes

11:18 pm on Feb 9, 2011 (gmt 0)

All,

I'm thinking of getting some inbound links to the deeper pages on my site.

I have linked to the main page root index.html heavily - 300 links or so - and have given a handful of links to a sub-page (this is to get the double clustered listing).

My main goal is to get the main page ranking higher - will getting more links to more sub-pages help the sites overall trust - thus helping the main page rank?

I may be paying for some links but dont want to waste my money if getting links to sub-pages dont help the top page rank higher.

Thanks

goodroi

1:23 am on Feb 10, 2011 (gmt 0)

Getting links to a subpage will help the entire site. The external link juice will flow through the internal links that exist on your sub page. This gives a ranking boost to all the pages your sub page links to.

The double clustered aka indented listing has evolved. You can now have your site be listing several times in the top ten. You just need relevant content and good link popularity to each page to have a chance at dominating a particular serp.

MrFewkes

11:18 am on Feb 10, 2011 (gmt 0)

Thanks ROI - I think its probably worth a go - not sure im going to be able to get more than 2 or 3 pages clustered myself - but yes - I have noticed one with 4 the other day - not a company name search either.
Cheers

MrFewkes

7:39 pm on Feb 10, 2011 (gmt 0)

I just had another thought on this.

Apart from "link juice" - could this be a factor.

Two sites - all is equal - each has 5 pages total - 1 index and 4 subpages each.

Site a) has 50 links to its home page and 0 links to any of its 4 subpages.
Site b) has 30 links to its home page and 5 links to each of its 4 subpages.

What Im saying is google **could** assign a ranking signal now to the root index page of site b) which says "Hey - site b) gets links to all its pages - boost its index because it must be better than site a) which only has links to its home page"

Would you guys think that site b)'s index would outrank site a)'s index all other things being equal?

SevenCubed

7:45 pm on Feb 10, 2011 (gmt 0)

Maybe

MrFewkes

9:16 pm on Feb 10, 2011 (gmt 0)

Hey SevenCubed - spill the beans eh?

:)

tedster

9:24 pm on Feb 10, 2011 (gmt 0)

It's going to depend on the actual query phrase used in the search. Links to internal pages are likely to be about sub-themes, some variation of the main theme. So how the queries are related is going to be part of the picture.

I'd say "maybe" is a good answer.

MrFewkes

9:42 pm on Feb 10, 2011 (gmt 0)

I'll do a test and post the results in a couple of weeks - it shouldnt take long to get a result on this - ive a sneaky feeling it could be quite a good idea.

Higher % of internal pages have links to them from external sites - the higher the rank of all the pages. Themes aside. (although will consider when applying anchors)

I can see that as the sort of thing google would consider.

tedster

10:03 pm on Feb 10, 2011 (gmt 0)

I agree. Occasionally Google people have mentioned that they use some sitewide factors in the ranking, but naturally not the details. One of those factors could well be whether internal pages attract backlinks.

Another might be how many pages have the potential to rank for that query term if their host crowding filter is ignored. A search like [site:example.com query term] can give you a rough idea, unless the keyword is in the main navigation.