can I link only my root URL and not the pages?

[Kikos]

Hi,
My website has many many articles and I write more every day and I would like, if possible, to make backlinks just to the root URL simply because I physically can not create huge amounts of links for each article.
But if I create a huge amount of links for the root URL, will this "power" flow or cascade down to all the individual pages inside that URL?

And If the benefit will NOT flow down, how do I proceed? given I can work only X amount of hours per day. Do I select specific articles and pump those or do I do a little bit for all articles?

Please assume no outsourcing for the moment.

Thank you very much for your advice.

[cpadualcore]

Thats a tough bet. Are all these articles in the same niche?

Does your domain has a PR value associated with it? From what I have experienced, if I have a domain with a decent PR (like PR3 or PR4), then whatever articles I publish on that site gets a higher SE rankings than an article backed up with hundreds of backlinks on a PR0 domain. And I didn't throw any backlinks for the individual articles on first case. Hope you understand what I mean...

However it will help if your site and content is in the same niche. If you got a site loseweight.com and your articles are about 'make money online', then thats a different story..

[John Romaine]

You should never push all of your backlinks to your home page. This looks artificial in nature and wont help your rankings at all.

Backlink diversity!

You should be backlinking to category pages, individual articles, and your home page using a variety of keywords within the anchor text.

[paulgl]

Internal linking is gold. As long as all other pages can
readily be gotten from the main site, no problem.

PR flows downhill.

You should indeed do the majority of your linking to the
main page anyway. Relevancy, authority, PR all flow
from this main page.

Obviously, some times you can make more than 1 link,
and more relevant, like at the bottom of a blog post.

75% to the main page, and the rest, occasionally to
the others.

But if you are not doing massive amounts of backlinking,
you should put them all to your main page.

Big, authoritative sites like amazon, wiki, etc. have subpages
ranked purely on the authority of the site. Not backlinks
to the individual products or pages.

Paul

[clickarticles]

It is better to have backlinks at least for the pages which can attract more traffic for your website. Internal linking is also very important.

[outwest]

Most people do it this way

Create a main url with a main kw (target kw for the domain)

Create many subpages (notice I said pages) targeted for different keywords

each of these subpages are backlinked individually (external backlinks) and that backlink juice will make each of these subpages rank for their individual kws , by targeting the Anchor Text of those backlinks for the kws that the subpages are made for. Example your main site is Old Cars.(kw) you make a subpage for 1957 Chevy Corvettes...........all the backlinks for 1957 Corvette are pointed towards not the main url of the site (old cars.com) but to The 1957 Chevy Corvette Page...only

If you really want to boost the kws also of the site, make sure not to interlink your pages incorrectly, This confuses google. Try to Silo Structure your site. This is by no means a 5 minute process to learn but once you study it , and learn how to do it, it helps A LOT in leaping past your competitors, (even if you have less backlinks)

[yukon]

I agree with outwest (above).

If you silo a site what your doing is creating a new home page (silo landing page) per individual keyword that you want to rank in the SERPs, while at the same time you boost your Index page keyword in the SERPs.

With a silo structured site, it makes the whole site easy to build in small chunks, which is what OP is looking for. Each silo is like it's own mini site, that supports the main Index page.

Most folks build a blog & go in just adding new blog post, totally unorganized & no long term plan, bad idea.

Instead of following the herd & building 10 MFA sites, I suggest building 10 silos on a single domain, you'll kick your competitions butt per keyword in the SERPs.

Most external links point at the silo landing pages, with a few pointing at the silo supporting pages, just to keep Google interested in the supporting pages.

If I told you to build a 100 page website, you would think that was a lot of work (it is).

If I told you to build a 10 page silo (single keyword), you would say "That's not so bad, I can handle that".

Repeat a new silo/keyword on the same domain the next day/week...

No joke, a properly structered silo site, makes every single thing you do (content, backlinks, etc...) very easy to manage in small chunks, because you have a long term plan.

[TheInternet]

It sounds like you're talking about making post series and linking the posts together in a landing page.

[webdevpro]

It will be better if you can manage to create backlinks for each individual article. Further suppose you create 10 backlinks in each day then you can go by the way of creating 8 links to main URL and 2 links to the specific articles page.

[eshapard]

page-rank juice flows from every page to every page it links to (more or less), so yes, page-rank will flow from your root to every other page.

Having the majority of backlinks pointed to your homepage is fine. I've heard that 70% is a good ration to have pointing to the root of your site, but that may be an old-im-wives tale.