Should my back links go to home page or internal pages
-
Right now we rank on page 2 for many KWs, so should i now focus my attention on getting links to my home page to build domain authority or continue to direct links to the internal pages for specific KWs?
I am about to write some articles for several good ranking sites and want to know whether to link my company name (same as domain name) or KW to the home page or use individual KWs to the internal pages - I am only allowed one link per article to my site.
Thanks
Ash
-
Always link by page and subject matter. If you have an article about red widgets, you should link back to the page you have about red widgets. True you can build up your home page with a lot of links, but this hurts your user experience by making them have to go through the entire site to find what they came there for.
When you send all your links to the homepage, you are suggesting what page is the most important to search engines. This can often be seen where you have sites that never have any subpages ranking or showing up in search results, only the home page over and over. Sounds great doesnt it? But you can limit the exposure of your site in the long run. By directing links at your subpages, not only do you increase the chance that they will eventually rank higher, you also can get more specific with your linking text.
Direct keyword linking to the home page is more risky. With your subpage links, you can get closer or even use exact keyword phrase links because the content is more specific. In reality, use whatever link phrase that a user will click on. A bunch of keywords might not do that job as well as a conversion statement. If you are worried about getting people to your home page, change the way the subpages are set up on your site, so that users can go to the other relevant areas of your site with ease. It should be easy and simple to direct them where you want them to go using graphics or styled text.
-
I agree with SilverDoor & donford!
Relevancy! Relevancy! Relevancy!
Don't get too caught up in your domain authority or page rank. Build naturally (for the users of your site)... and it all shall come
-
Completely agree with SilverDoor (thumbs up). Backlinks should always point to the most relevant page.
The way I always approach it by not driving myself nuts over pushing up Domain Authority or a certain page's Page Rank rather focus on the unique content that will drive itself to get links. Once you have the content in place, you of course have to do some work getting yourself noticed, but once that happens you'll find backlinks coming from multiple places with no additional work required.
-
Hi Ash,
The best way to work out where you should point the backlink to is by asking yourself this question:
What is the most related and useful page on my website for the article I have written?
Take it from a readers perspective. Would they prefer to go to your homepage or a more specific internal page?
Once you can answer that question then you know where to link to.
Make sure to not over-optimise the keywords you use for your anchor text.Just put them on the most natural, relevant word in your article.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Why does Google display the home page rather than a page which is better optimised to answer the query?
I have a page which (I believe) is well optimised for a specific keyword (URL, title tag, meta description, H1, etc). yet Google chooses to display the home page instead of the page more suited to the search query. Why is Google doing this and what can I do to stop it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Any idea why Google Search Console stopped showing "Internal Links" and "Links to your site"
Our default eCommerce property (https://www.pure-elegance.com) used to show several dozen External Links and several thousand Internal Links on Google Search Console. As of this Friday both those links are showing "No Data Available". I checked other related properties (https://pure-elegance.com, http:pure-elegance.com and http://www.pure-elegance.com) and all of them are showing the same. Our other statistics (like Search Analytics etc.) remain unchanged. Any idea what might have caused this and how to resolve this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SudipG0 -
Number of Links for Internal E-commerce Search Pages (and Anchor Text)
Hello! We have an internal search engine for different email, postal, and phone data products on our website (75,000 product pages... calling all direct marketers!), I've noindexed all our dynamic search pages, but I'm wondering how else I can improve these pages. Should I reduce the amount of links on each page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
Currently there are 20 search results per page. " <variable>Mailing List" has been a pretty good source of traffic for our product pages.
Should I change the anchor text for all the product pages listed to include the added long-tail keyword, or would that be extremely spammy, having the word "Mailing List" 20+ times on my page? We have both static and dynamic search pages - here is one of static ones: http://www.consumerbase.com/direct-marketing-mailing-lists.html
My main problem with adding the long tail KWs to the anchor text is that we still want our static search pages indexed.</variable> Thanks!0 -
A sneaky site? Two URLs with a similar layout linking back and forth.
Hello. I have a competitor that is on the front page of Google (and often at or near the top) for many desirable keywords - almost unbelievably so. I notice that their site has a blog. When I click the blog button, I am taken to a different URL that has a very similar layout with a similar navigation bar, etc. When I click one of the navigation buttons on the blog site, I am taken back to the other URL. This seems strange. Is there some ranking benefit to having two URLs set up like this? Is this a sneaky site? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyc-seo0 -
Best internal linking structure?
We are considering implementing a site-wide contextual linking structure. Does anyone have some good guidelines / blog posts on this topic? Our site is quite (over 1 million pages), so the contextual linking would be automated, but we need to define a set of rules. Basically, if we have a great page on 'healthy recipes,' should we make every instance of the word 'healthy recipes' link back to that page, or should we limit it to a certain number of pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Best practice for removing indexed internal search pages from Google?
Hi Mozzers I know that it’s best practice to block Google from indexing internal search pages, but what’s best practice when “the damage is done”? I have a project where a substantial part of our visitors and income lands on an internal search page, because Google has indexed them (about 3 %). I would like to block Google from indexing the search pages via the meta noindex,follow tag because: Google Guidelines: “Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.” http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 Bad user experience The search pages are (probably) stealing rankings from our real landing pages Webmaster Notification: “Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site” with links to our internal search results I want to use the meta tag to keep the link juice flowing. Do you recommend using the robots.txt instead? If yes, why? Should we just go dark on the internal search pages, or how shall we proceed with blocking them? I’m looking forward to your answer! Edit: Google have currently indexed several million of our internal search pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HrThomsen0 -
Indexation of content from internal pages (registration) by Google
Hello, we are having quite a big amount of content on internal pages which can only be accessed as a registered member. What are the different options the get this content indexed by Google? In certain cases we might be able to show a preview to visitors. In other cases this is not possible for legal reasons. Somebody told me that there is an option to send the content of pages directly to google for indexation. Unfortunately he couldn't give me more details. I only know that this possible for URLs (sitemap). Is there really a possibility to do this for the entire content of a page without giving google access to crawl this page? Thanks Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | guitarslinger0 -
Is it better to link to the root domain or to the language home page?
Hi guys! When dealing with linkbuilding for a multi language page such as www.inmonova.com is it better to get external links pointing at inmonova.com or is it better to point: English links to inmonova.com/en Spanish links to inmonova.com/es German links to inmonova.com/de What is your opinion?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inmonova0