Internal page linking structure

by 6 replies
7
Can anyone tell me do deep pages have to directly link to your home page in order for Google to give credit?

For example I currently have 50 pages which I have created with various secondary key words. Most of these pages have 500 words of unique content per page. Some of the keywords are on my home page and some are just variations. Many are long tailed key words that i want to rank for. Right now I have a separate page called Articles.html and this is linked to my home page. On this articles page I have a link to all 50 articles. Is this okay and do I even need to have this articles page or will Google found the pages and index them regardless if they are linked to my home page?
#search engine optimization #internal #linking #page #structure
  • Beatstockpromoters,

    As a rule of thumb from a usability standpoint, your visitors should never be more than 5 layers away from the home page at max. So, no matter where they are on your site, they should be able to get back to the home page easily.

    As far as search bots are concerned, yes, having logical and easy to follow navigation is better for you in the long run. It also helps to sculpt your page rank among pages in your site.

    Here is a good post about sculpting page rank,

    PageRank sculpting

    Best,

    Shawn
    • [1] reply
    • I understand this but I am still wondering if I need the articles page with all the links or can I just have hundreds or thousands of pages which aren't directly linked to my hompepage and google will be okay with this?
      • [1] reply
  • Google will crawl your site to find pages, beginning with your home. If a page isn't somehow connected to your home page, Google will have a hard time finding it. So I'd keep the articles page. This is strictly an answer for indexing. Doing it the way you are for SEO doesn't make sense, but you'll at least allow Google to find all of your pages.
  • it's good to interlink from a user experience perspective, you should have a sitemap also if you don't
  • You should make sure to distribute some link juice around to your best article pages, landing pages and main domain. You should also make sure people can navigate to all your pages through links. (With tools like A1 Website Analyzer, you can also see how your internal linking distributes link juice incase you want to get into the details.)
Join the discussion

Next Topics on Trending Feed

  • 7

    Internal page linking structure

    Can anyone tell me do deep pages have to directly link to your home page in order for Google to give credit? For example I currently have 50 pages which I have created with various secondary key words. Most of these pages have 500 words of unique content per page. Some of the keywords are on my home page and some are just variations. Many are long tailed key words that i want to rank for. Right now I have a separate page called Articles.html and this is linked to my home page. On this articles page I have a link to all 50 articles. Is this okay and do I even need to have this articles page or will Google found the pages and index them regardless if they are linked to my home page?