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Internal linking - LOTS of it or NOTS of it?

by FlashDriveDT
10 replies
Ok folks, I'm confused....when I started out with affiliate marketing and setting up my website I was led to believe that the best thing one could do is have LOTS of internal linking. So that google can crawl all over your site and see those anchor texts. Ok, fair enough...

But now from a refined SEO/marketing perspective it actually seems to be more beneficial to limit internal links to 1 or 2 per page, especially if you have good external backlink campaigns going on. Why? Because apparently the more internal links you have the more PR juice you "lose" to these links. If you have like 10 links (which I often do at the bottom of a post) it all gets split up between these, reducing the PR juice/rank of the post itself. Can anyone confirm this?

Now I know that most people say PR isnt so important anymore - BUT if you are in a competitive niche the PR of 2 or 4 for a a single post/page can definitely give you an edge in the SERP rankings. For that specific post you want to rank as well as the site in general.... Am I onto something here?

In case anyone's wondering, I actually stumbled upon this issue when I installed the Robots Meta wordpress plug-in. There it states for instance:
Nofollow category listings on single posts
If you're showing a category listing on all your single posts and pages, you're "leaking" quite a bit of PageRank towards these pages, whereas you probably want your single posts to rank. To prevent that from happening, check the two boxes above, and you will nofollow all the links to your categories from single posts and/or pages.
Or:
Nofollow outbound links on the frontpage
If you want to keep the link-juice on your front page to yourself, enable this, and you will only pass link-juice from your post pages.
This pretty much startled me as I never thought of that before...I did some research on the net and sure enough, this does seem to be an issue.

So what would you guys recommend? What is a good amount of internal dofollow links per post? Should especially category links be nofollowed?
#internal #linking #lots #nots
  • Profile picture of the author JohnMcCabe
    What you are describing is called "page rank sculpting". The basic idea is to guide the flow of any juice to the pages you want to rank and not leak to the pages you don't care about.

    The classic example is the privacy page. It probably has a link in the footer, and therefore on every page on your site. Yet you don't really want to send your link juice to your privacy page. So you use no-follow (or some other technique) to block the flow of juice to the privacy page.

    Another simple sculpting plan is to only allow the flow of link juice in one direction. Typically, the home page has the highest PR and therefore the most juice to spread around. You want the juice to flow from the front page to the post pages. (I'm generalizing here.) So you do-follow links from your home page to your category pages and from your category pages to your post pages. You no-follow the links back to the category pages and from the category pages back to the home page. In theory, you can set things up so that all of the available link juice is focused on a single page.

    You can get as complex as you want with this, but you reach a point of diminishing returns very quickly. You also run the risk of sending up the "unnatural attempt to game the system" red flag.

    Dan Thies is your guy on this one. Pick up a copy of his freebie SEO Fast Start...

    Free SEO Book: Read SEO Fast Start by Dan Thies (non-aff)
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    • Profile picture of the author FlashDriveDT
      Originally Posted by JohnMcCabe View Post

      What you are describing is called "page rank sculpting". The basic idea is to guide the flow of any juice to the pages you want to rank and not leak to the pages you don't care about.

      The classic example is the privacy page. It probably has a link in the footer, and therefore on every page on your site. Yet you don't really want to send your link juice to your privacy page. So you use no-follow (or some other technique) to block the flow of juice to the privacy page.

      Another simple sculpting plan is to only allow the flow of link juice in one direction. Typically, the home page has the highest PR and therefore the most juice to spread around. You want the juice to flow from the front page to the post pages. (I'm generalizing here.) So you do-follow links from your home page to your category pages and from your category pages to your post pages. You no-follow the links back to the category pages and from the category pages back to the home page. In theory, you can set things up so that all of the available link juice is focused on a single page.

      You can get as complex as you want with this, but you reach a point of diminishing returns very quickly. You also run the risk of sending up the "unnatural attempt to game the system" red flag.

      Dan Thies is your guy on this one. Pick up a copy of his freebie SEO Fast Start...

      Free SEO Book: Read SEO Fast Start by Dan Thies (non-aff)
      That's very insightful John. Thanks. But what about the side navigation bar? Naturally it displays on ever single page with dofollow links. But I guess those links are viewed separately by Google, huh?
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      • Profile picture of the author JohnMcCabe
        Originally Posted by FlashDriveDT View Post

        That's very insightful John. Thanks. But what about the side navigation bar? Naturally it displays on ever single page with dofollow links. But I guess those links are viewed separately by Google, huh?
        They don't have to be do-follow. With a little tech savvy, they wouldn't even have to be live links. You could do it with CSS divs and javascript using the onClick action.

        Spiders would just see some extra words, while human visitors would get navigation links they could click. It all depends on how complicated you want to make it.

        I usually don't make it that complicated. I figure the juice sent via the navigation bar to other pages within my site (like the home page and category pages) drips back to the post pages anyway, so I don't worry about it.

        If I had one money page that I really wanted to help as much as possible, I might think about getting crazier with link sculpting.
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  • Profile picture of the author NateDesmond
    I would recommend some linking, but only when it is beneficial to your visitors.

    I try to always put my visitors first - on-site SEO second.
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  • Profile picture of the author InternetMarketingIQ
    Make a sitemap for the search engine then simple navigation for the user. That's it.
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  • Profile picture of the author Dan.Thies
    Just a quick question, Flash - how large is your site?
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    • Profile picture of the author FlashDriveDT
      Not that large really. Why? I still don't know for sure if the PR juice of a post itself gets reduced. Because interestingly enough, when I went through all my pages and nofollowed most of my links I noticed that almost all of my pages actually had a PR3 already. My homepage has a PR4 so apparently google still passes on sufficient juice to the subpages regardless of how many internal dofollow links you have. At least the sidebar and bottom links dont seem to matter as much as the links within the post body. Still, I feel better having done some conscious sculpting now. Will be interesting to see if anything changes...
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  • Profile picture of the author FlashDriveDT
    Btw, for those who are interested some valuable links about the topic:

    Internal Link Structure and Passing Link Juice Internally | SEO White Hats

    How many links per page?

    SEOmoz | Matt Cutts on Nofollow, Links-Per-Page and the Value of Directories
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  • Profile picture of the author Nemanja
    Internal linking for sure and as much as possible...but the best option would be to link to other pages by adding links in your content, these are the most powerful ones.

    Nemanja
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