Internal linking question

8 years ago

Originally Posted by jay168888

Hi everyone,

We have question about internal linking. We have the following:

1 piece main cornerstone page

8 pieces 2nd level pages

50 blog posts

Our questions are as follow, and would you assist us by letting us know if these are the logical steps to proceed. Thank you all in advance.

1. we are planning to have the 2nd level pages and blog posts all point to the main cornerstone page, all internal links do-follow

2- main cornerstone page internal link point to 2nd level pages, all no-follow

3- all blog posts internal link point to 2nd level pages, all no-follow

4- all outbound links to other sites, including affiliate links, all no-follow

5- all outbound links appear multiple times on our sites, so we use Pretty Links, and we use Disallow: /tshirts in Robot txt setting to inform the search engine no to follow these links

Hello,

If you build a page with content, you only link to other pages on your site, that is relevant to the page that you are talking about, so to be clear, I don't care what page your on, but if you link out to other pages on your site, it should be because it has something to do with what your talking about.

Example

Lets say this is a long 1000 word text and we are at the end of content,

You could say something like this, Ok if you have any questions, please contact me,
Click Here,

and the click here is the hyperlink to your support page,

Now Google likes that,
don't just link for something that has nothing to do with what your talking about.Google does not like dumb links, that is link stuffing, don't do it

Also only add 3 to 5 links per 1000 thousand words on page content.

Ok hopes this helps
Thanks Rob.

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jay168888

8 years ago

Thank you so much Rob, this helps a lot, thanks for the insights! One more question, for internal links, should we make it do-follow or no-follow, or mix them up?

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smartprofitmoney

8 years ago

Originally Posted by jay168888

Thank you so much Rob, this helps a lot, thanks for the insights! One more question, for internal links, should we make it do-follow or no-follow, or mix them up?

Hello,

No if your using WordPress just make hyper links, no follow and do follow is what it says,

but by default on WordPess, it is not ticked on, so do not tick it on, your xmlsite should be setup to do it's job, but you don;t use do and not follow from your own pages in internal linking, do follow or no follow is for linking out on the web, not your inside pages.

Ok please read up on do follow and no follow , Google it,

Thanks Rob.

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Experito

8 years ago

You can link to trustworthy websites using dofollow links - should not harm you at all

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dave_hermansen

8 years ago

Almost all internal links should be dofollow (unless they are to boilerplate pages that you do not care about ranking, like Site Policies, TOS, Privacy Policy, etc. pages).

We usually dofollow links to other websites, as well. Otherwise, you are pretty much telling Google that what you are linking to is unimportant, which is not the best signal to be sending about your content. We do, however, make sure that those external links open in a separate tab/window.

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MikeFriedman

8 years ago

Originally Posted by dave_hermansen

Almost all internal links should be dofollow (unless they are to boilerplate pages that you do not care about ranking, like Site Policies, TOS, Privacy Policy, etc. pages).

I would not nofollow links to those pages either. Otherwise you are just bleeding out linkjuice.

Plus sometimes for searches Google will show those pages as sitelinks in your listing, which means you are taking up more real estate in the SERP and looking more like an authority.

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lauriat1 8 years ago

by the way no=follow also dillutes link juice. Its google's way to fight internal link sculpting.

The only way to preserve internal link juice is to limit the links.
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dave_hermansen

8 years ago

Originally Posted by MikeFriedman

I would not nofollow links to those pages either. Otherwise you are just bleeding out linkjuice.

Plus sometimes for searches Google will show those pages as sitelinks in your listing, which means you are taking up more real estate in the SERP and looking more like an authority.

Hey Mike,

We don't nofollow those things in the Navigation bar. We only tend to do it when they are mentioned in text.

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MikeFriedman

8 years ago

Originally Posted by dave_hermansen

Hey Mike,

We don't nofollow those things in the Navigation bar. We only tend to do it when they are mentioned in text.

The problem is there is no advantage to doing that. It does not conserve linkjuice. The linkjuice still flows through the link. It just doesn't get credited to the page being linked to. It falls off into a black hole.

I'd rather keep it on my site.

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dave_hermansen

8 years ago

Originally Posted by MikeFriedman

The problem is there is no advantage to doing that. It does not conserve linkjuice. The linkjuice still flows through the link. It just doesn't get credited to the page being linked to. It falls off into a black hole.

I'd rather keep it on my site.

It's already credited to the page because it has been linked to in the navigation bar. Frankly, if my TOS and Privacy Policy pages, themselves, fall into the black hole, I'm not concerned.

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MikeFriedman

8 years ago

Originally Posted by dave_hermansen

It's already credited to the page because it has been linked to in the navigation bar. Frankly, if my TOS and Privacy Policy pages, themselves, fall into the black hole, I'm not concerned.

That's not what I'm saying.

Each page has a certain amount of linkjuice it can pass on through its links. When you nofollow a link, that portion of the linkjuice just falls into a black hole.

I would rather not have the link to a privacy policy be nofollow because then that link juice can be redistributed throughout the site.

There is zero advantage to adding nofollow to an internal link.

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dave_hermansen

8 years ago

I guess I do not see the value in passing a link from one page to another on the same site to then be redistributed when the initial page being linked to has no value anyway. It's an infinite loop - especially since that page and the main pages of the entire site are being linked to anyway from the navigation of both the sending page and the one that would get the followed or nofolllowed link.

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MikeFriedman

8 years ago

Originally Posted by dave_hermansen

I guess I do not see the value in passing a link from one page to another on the same site to then be redistributed when the initial page being linked to has no value anyway. It's an infinite loop - especially since that page and the main pages of the entire site are being linked to anyway from the navigation of both the sending page and the one that would get the followed or nofolllowed link.

Because any internal link tagged nofollow is bleeding linkjuice, PR, authority, etc. off of the site.

There is no benefit to making it nofollow.

Now if it was still 2007, yes then absolutely because back then nofollow caused the page's linkjuice to only flow through the other links. It conserved linkjuice and PR. That has not been the case since 2008.

This image does the best job I've seen of explaining how nofollow is handled compared to how it used to be handled.

And if you don't want a page like a privacy policy to show up in the SERPs, that is what the noindex tag is for.

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JackMr

8 years ago

Originally Posted by dave_hermansen

Almost all internal links should be dofollow (unless they are to boilerplate pages that you do not care about ranking, like Site Policies, TOS, Privacy Policy, etc. pages).

We usually dofollow links to other websites, as well. Otherwise, you are pretty much telling Google that what you are linking to is unimportant, which is not the best signal to be sending your content. We do, however, make sure that those external links open in a separate tab/window.

this is a good answer, regularly internal links are dofollow, about the 3rd level blog posts and your deeper content you can use social media 2nd level pages and first pages but make sure that it's relevant content, also you can use a footer menu or tags bar to make your content at your site more "shallow" and that can help.

about dofollow to other websites be careful with it.

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Chandu11

8 years ago

Hai This is Chandu...

I Agree with the words specified by smartprofitmoney. As my point of few one inter link is enough and max two. hopping more information from other.....

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PBScott

8 years ago

NoFollow was only supposed to be for pages you don't trust, so internal links should all be dofollow.

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lauriat1 8 years ago

Not entirely true, A link with a nofollow tag tells search engines "don't follow this specific link", essentially saying "we aren't sharing our authority with this website, but we want users to navigate to it".
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jay168888

8 years ago

Thanks everyone for your input and fantastic suggestions, taken all your suggestion into consideration, this is how we have decided to restructure our entire site's internal and outbound linking, we'd appreciate some final input before we actually proceed.

The description is a bit long, we apologize, please bear with us...

Your further suggestions and input will be truly appreciated.

Our new site is going to have a pyramid structure:

Top of the pyramid

This is our top main page targeting one main keyword, this is the most important page of our site. We will only link to 8 of our own pages, all dofollow internal links.

This is where our affiliate conversion happens, so we will have about 10-15 affiliate links. We will be using Pretty Links, so for example, all link structure would be https:siteurl/companyname

Because these affiliate links are all outbound links, we'd like to inform the search engine not to give link juice to these links, so we are using Robot txt plugin, and use such commands: Disallow: /companyname

2nd level pages

We have 8 cornerstone pages targeting different long tail keywords, all pointing back to the top main page, all dofollow links. We will link to some of our related blog posts, all dofollow links.

To make these pages useful to visitors, we will also link to some authoritative websites, we will make these dofollow also.

3rd level blog posts

3rd level blog posts will link to our top main page, and each point will link to 1 cornerstone page that is relevant, all dofollow

4th level blog posts

4th level blog posts will link to our top main page, 1 cornerstone page, and 1 3rd level blog post, all dofollow.

Outbound link to authoritative website will be dofollow, and affiliate link using Pretty Link will be nofollow.