Build links to home page or internal to rank internal pages?
-
I understand that naturally people link to the home page and internal pages - probably the home page more often than not. In order to build a natural looking link profile I also understand that I need a variety of anchor text, brand and url links. Should I be building links mainly to the home page with only a few to internal pages? Ultimately I want my internal pages to rank for specific terms so in my head it makes sense to concentrate my link building effort to internal pages but that would seem unnatural to google I'm sure.
For arguments sake if I only built links to the home page with a mix of the anchor texts described above would these internal pages rank eventually anyway as 'link juice' flows throughout the site? Or is it an absolute must to build some links to internal pages. Could a page rank for a keyword without having any links to the site with the keyword anchor text (simply url links) based on the page title/content?
Also what is a good ratio of home page to internal links? I would assume around 10:1?
A lot of questions I know but I'm confused as to what will be the best strategy.
-
MOST of your links should be internal pages...especially if you run a site with a lot of pages.
Take a blog with 150 posts. What are the odds that 90% of his links point to his (or her) homepage?
There's no hard and fast rule about what percentage of homepage vs. internal links you should have...but I try to have less than 50% of my links pointing to my homepage.
-
I agree - I think it's important to do more than just the home page. I don't agree there's a specific science / ratio to it for a few reasons: if it was that specific, everyone would do it and we know Google wouldn't let it be that obvious because people would game the system.
There's relative factors to consider: some pages on your site may be way more competitive to rank for than others. If your overall domain authority is a little lower, you have to compensate for that. On my site, I can get some pages to rank well pretty much just with on page optimization because it's not a competitive term. There's others that are taking tons of links, strong keyword hierarchy and such to even get into the top 20.
The best strategy for you will (I'd assume) be based on evaluating how competitive your field is and what pages you want to rank for the best user experience to drive conversions. Will just your homepage do that? Do you need other pages w/in your site to offer a better experience?
-
I happen to think that your link profile needs to be robust to your internal pages. Think about user experience here. If someone is on another blog and writing about red apples, would the person want to go to the home page of a farmers website about red apples or a sub-page about red apples. I just think that is natural. If they go to the homepage of your site then they will have to find the page on red apples. I can image that your bounce rate would be pretty high if that was the case. I don't worry to much about percentages on any sort of link building campaign. I don't know if 10:1 or 15:1 or 1:1 is correct. I can tell you from just about everything the search engines do that percentages don't matter. It's about quality. As a general rule of thumb, its going to depend on your type of website you are building. If you have an e-commerce site and the link is from some where talking about sites as a whole, the link to your home page is fine. But, if the source of the link is talking about a particular product, then I think that link needs to be to a particular sub-page talking about that product. Again, don't get caught up in percentages. If you have high quality link prospects then you will naturally be varying your link profile. If you are using automated links then you won't. Hope that helps a little.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How many links per week/month should a link building campaign acquire?
I am running a linkbuilding campaign for my company. I am mostly focusing on guest blogging opportunities and responding to emails from HARO. How many links would I have to acquire each week or month to be considered doing a good job over a 6 month or a year time period? Thank you,
Link Building | | fersu0 -
Anchor text and internal link building very fast
Hey guys, I just posted an article about "Customer Success". After that, I searched in my blog all the articles that contains that keyword and then linked to this new article I want to rank. Is this a bad thing to do, linking all these articles (12) in a row? Also, is it a bad thing to use "Customer Success" as the anchor text for all the articles linking to this new article? I looked for this topic but couldn´t find any. Thanks
Link Building | | amirfariabr0 -
Internal Linking Building
I'm launching a new blog for my new website. What's the best way to do internal link building for 3D Scanning? Do I link 3D Scanning to another page on my website or on a different website that has high authority for 3D scanning? Thank You in advance! -Nick
Link Building | | X2Metrology10 -
Internal Links: How Important and How to Boost
A couple of my competitors have WAY more internal links than I do, and are outranking me. Could that be an important factor? (Let's assume all other things equal, i.e. don't bother explaining that it's complicated and many factors are involved, please.) If boosting the number is important, what's the best way to do it (site is heliski.com) thx, tj
Link Building | | heliski0 -
Link building too quickly
Hi all, I have recently started trialing to outsource some SEO to a 3rd party, who obviously promissed white hat techniques and manual links etc.. All has gone well for the first month. But on speeking to another expert they point out that the search engines will spot inconcistencies in link building and penalise me. I know there will not be a know ammount but as we stand at the moment, what is the current feeling of too fast. Links built for me in one month were 100 directory submissions 80 bookmarks 16 search engine submissions 15 Article submissions 46 forum links 10 local classified searches Is this too fast? , If to do I stop and create more inconsistency or continue at a similar rate. Of course quality of link will be an issue, but how much. Many thanks from SEO jnr
Link Building | | smartcow0 -
What is the difference between external followed links and internal followed links.
I have almost 3,000 external links followed and only a tiny amount of internal followed links. My website is doing really badly on google at the mo. I am also an SEO beginner and learning new stuff every day, but am not sure exactly what the difference is! Thanks!
Link Building | | heleni0 -
Link-Building
Hello, I have been doing link-building for my website since 2 of January. However those links are not in the Open Site Explorer. For example I have the DMOZ website pointing to my website and I cant see it in open site explorer! Why?? Tks in advance!
Link Building | | PedroM0 -
Link building, does query string matter?
Hi All, We have some partners which link to our site, and they put "?ref=SITENAME" so we Can identify the source of the link....but does this matter to the search engines? Does this count as a different page than the one without the query string? -Rasmus
Link Building | | rasmusbang0