Linking out from the main page?

[outwest]

Is this necessary?
I know people say its important, but one of my competitors ranks 1,2 for about 400 to 500 terms in that niche

has 1000s of backlinks to his internal pages
I know for a fact those link back to the main site page
but
The main Root domain in no way links out to those pages

[packerfan]

Are you talking about linking from your home page to your internal pages, or linking from your home page to a page that is not on your website?

I'm assuming it's the second, but it's worded funny. It sounds like you've already answered your own question. It's not required. Google might give you some domain authority credit or something, but I'm not really sure.

You could always get crazy though and if it's something that benefits your sites visitors link to it...

[ashleysmith12]

hi
link of internal pages matters, if the home pages is less and inner page link are good then over all ranking going to be good also.

[outwest]

Actually , I know this sounds normal but i dont want my competitors to view my home page and have it link out to all my special pages and find all my good kws that way

also there are too many internal pages to be listed on the home page and I dont see a reason for it

now if they happen to search a kw? and find it listed in google that way? sure no problem they found one of my internal pages
But I dont want some master list linking out from my root domain of those pages

[Ace1337]

It's natural to link from the homepage to your most important keywords.

But it should also have a natural flow that makes sense on the site.

[Trevor]

Originally Posted by outwest

Is this necessary?
I know people say its important, but one of my competitors ranks 1,2 for about 400 to 500 terms in that niche

has 1000s of backlinks to his internal pages
I know for a fact those link back to the main site page
but
The main Root domain in no way links out to those pages

Hi Outwest.

If you are talking about linking out to authority sites in your niche from the main page, then yes, this is a good thing to do. I have been using two strategies to link out to authority sites:

1) from the home page's sticky post or static page
2) from the footer
3) from a page called "Links" dedicated for this purpose.

The first strategy seems to be working best for me, but you may want to try for yourself.

Also, don't link out to pages that could directly compete with you in the SERPs. For example, if my site's main keyword is "best creatine supplement", I wouldn't link to any site that promotes creatine supplement, but I may link to a Wikipedia page about creatine as a chemical compound.

Many people will tell you to nofollow those links, but I leave them dofollow, I think nofollowing them is not a good strategy.

[outwest]

No I am not talking about linking out to other authority sites, I am speaking stricly of internal linking on my site

[usaimarketing]

We always need to build back links for the home page of our website as well as for other internal pages of our websites. It will help us to get good value of internal links for our entire website. When we get page rank for our internal pages, that Page Rank will definitely strengthen our home page and other product pages as well via internal linking.

[Trevor]

Originally Posted by outwest

No I am not talking about linking out to other authority sites, I am speaking stricly of internal linking on my site

I link out from the home page to the most important internal pages of my site. The way I structure my sites is, I promote one main "theme" keyword on the home page, then have a bunch of primary keywords that I target on internal pages I am talking about and then have many blog posts on which I target other secondary keywords.

My theme keyword and primary keywords have to carry commercial intent, so that they will lead to conversions. The secondary keywords that I promote on the blog posts do not need to be "buying" keywords, information keywords are fine, because I create this additional content only to add "depth" to my site as such.

So I may have my theme keyword, then, say, 10 primary keywords that I target on internal pages and then, sometimes, a few hundred secondary keywords that I target with blog posts.

This has helped me build authority sites with a lot of content that get a lot of traffic from both the theme/primary keywords and also other longer-tail keywords that are somehow worked into the many blog posts I have.

As I said, I link to all the internal pages from my home page, plus some related authority sites in my niche.

Hope this helps some of you.

[outwest]

Hi that does help somewhat
thanks

this is an adsense site so I dont worry too much about "buying kws"

I am primarily trying to keep my competitors from harvesting a list of all my good kws if they click on my main Root domain, which they will if I link out to all of them IMO

For example with Silos
If I have 30 main silos that are all interlinked within each silo, all linking back to the main silo pages

I dont want to link out to the 30 Silo landing pages from my main page
because a competitor could easily come in and say OH AHH he is going after this kw, that one, that one that one,
I know there are probably software out there that shows them this nothing I can do to prevent this but I would prefer not to lay it all out on a silver platter for them

I think especially the newbie or somewhat new webmasters would not be sophisticated enough to use some of those tools, but certainly if I have a list of all my main Silo kws laid out it would be super easy to take all of them

if they happen to pull up one of my internal pages on google for that kw? sure fine
but I dont want them to easily find a list of all my kws that I am targeting and I feel that If I do link out they will be able to

I know one of my competitors ranks 1,2 on about 500 kws and this is all off of one domain and he certainly doesnt link out from the main page to those main kw landing pages

[Barry Unruh]

You don't use an all encompassing sitemap? What prevents those competitors from just looking at your sitemap.xml file?

[prcys]

Originally Posted by outwest

Is this necessary?
I know people say its important, but one of my competitors ranks 1,2 for about 400 to 500 terms in that niche

has 1000s of backlinks to his internal pages
I know for a fact those link back to the main site page
but
The main Root domain in no way links out to those pages

As which pages of the site hold the best and useful information then try to get the links to those pages and do not worry more for whether it is the main page or the internal page. And provide link to that page and if you get the backlink to any of the page and if visitor find it useful then he/she definitely going to visit the other pages of the site.

[outwest]

Originally Posted by Barry Unruh

You don't use an all encompassing sitemap? What prevents those competitors from just looking at your sitemap.xml file?

How do you block them

[yukon]

A simple site:domain.com search on Google will reveal all your indexed pages/keywords.

Personally I wouldn't worry about it. If competition wants the keywords they'll find them.

I would avoid running the keyword meta tag, that's one of the first things I check on competition to find their keywords, lol.

[JammerJones]

If I understand correctly, what you're doing is absurd. You're sacrificing user experience, making it harder for your visitors to navigate through your website because you think that's going to stop competitors from figuring out which keywords you're after? There are plenty of ways for competitors to figure out what you're up to - you're just shooting yourself in the foot.

[packerfan]

Okay, lets clear up some myths.

1. Your competitors are working as hard as you are. If they are, they already know about the same keywords you do.

2. Not linking to your category pages from your home page is dumb. What's the purpose of your home page if it's not to help visitors navigate your site.

3. In most cases your home page has the highest PR of any page on your site. You want that link juice spreading around to your category pages.

4. There are like 50 other ways for your competitor to find out every page on your site in under 2 minutes. You can do the same on their site.

Build your home page for your visitors, and just make a better site than your competitor and you'll be fine.

[Barry Unruh]

Originally Posted by yukon

A simple site:domain.com search on Google will reveal all your indexed pages/keywords.

Personally I wouldn't worry about it. If competition wants the keywords they'll find them.

I would avoid running the keyword meta tag, that's one of the first things I check on competition to find their keywords, lol.

Of course they could just go to GAKT and choose to put your URL in rather than search terms and find out what phrases Google sees you as targeting anyway. I do that on a regular basis when I look at a niche with all the pages in the first 10 slots to get an idea of additional seed keywords to research for my site.

Many of those phrases do not meet my criteria, but they are at least helpful...

I doubt you want to try to block your sitemap file. You want it to be available for spiders to find and use, which makes it accessible to people who go looking for it, too.

[Saito]

Should I have multiple links from my homepage to each of the Main Pages (as in Links within the content, in a Related posts list under the content, in the Nav Bar, in the sidebar, and in the footer)?

Or is it better to just have ONE link per page to each page I want to channel to juice into?

[JammerJones]

Originally Posted by Saito

Should I have multiple links from my homepage to each of the Main Pages (as in Links within the content, in a Related posts list under the content, in the Nav Bar, in the sidebar, and in the footer)?

Or is it better to just have ONE link per page to each page I want to channel to juice into?

It's overkill to link to your category pages that many times but you don't need to limit it to just one place. Link to them from your main nav and within your content.

[mightiest]

Originally Posted by Saito

Should I have multiple links from my homepage to each of the Main Pages (as in Links within the content, in a Related posts list under the content, in the Nav Bar, in the sidebar, and in the footer)?

Or is it better to just have ONE link per page to each page I want to channel to juice into?

Stop worrying so much about how "link juice" flows around your site and concentrate on creating a decent user experience. It's no surprise that, for the most part, good on-page SEO is highly correlated with a good user experience. Think about a few of the factors that Google counts against your on-page SEO and think about how closely they related to the user experience:

• Keyword-stuffed articles / poorly spun articles -- nobody wants to read incomprehensible english
• Duplicate content -- if someone can read it elsewhere, why is your site important?
• Too many ads above the fold -- Users don't want to be bombarded with advertisements.
• KW present in H1, H2, H3, tags etc -- shows organization and that the page is likely closely related to what the user wants.

There are definitely things you can do to maximize your on-page SEO, but for the most part keeping the user experience in mind is a great way to get started.

[Saito]

I appreciate your response, but I don't see it as an either-or issue and trust me, I'm not worrying about it--just looking for answers. I fully intend to do both internal linking and user experience/great content well.

[bobcarlsjr]

i do a lot of linking to my internal pages..

but just to help users navigate easier and get more information from my website..