Backlinks to internal pages help website to rank better or vice versa?
-
Hi Moz community,
We have our backlinks mostly pointed to our homepage. We are trying to rank better and not having minimum number of backlinks to our internal pages is one of the things I worry about. Backlinks to homepage alone help in ranking internal pages or backlinks to internal pages help in ranking homepage? Or both required?
Thanks
-
William is right your site structure helps Google and your visitor to understand your website better, and therefore it can push your site up in the rankings.
Structuring your website is crucial for both usability and findability. A lot of sites lack a decent structure to guide visitors to the product they’re looking for. Apart from that, having a clear site structure leads to better understanding of your site by Google, so it’s very important for your SEO.
Relationships between content
Google crawls websites by following links, internal and external, using a bot called Google bot. This bot arrives at the homepage of a website, starts to render the page and follows the first link. By following links Google determines the relationship between the various pages, posts and other content. This way Google finds out which pages on your site cover similar subject matter.
In the sidebar of this post, for example, you’ll see links to the category ‘Content SEO’ and to the ‘Internal linking’ and ‘Site structure’ tags. We make sure Google understands that the content on those pages is related to the content of this post by adding these links.
Setting up an internal linking strategy
It’s crucial for your SEO to evaluate and improve internal linking strategy on a regular basis. By adding the right internal links you make sure Google understands the relevance of pages, the relationship between pages and the value of pages.
Ideal site structure
The structure of your site should be like a pyramid. On the top of the pyramid is your homepage, and underneath the homepage a number of category pages. For larger sites, you should make subcategories or custom taxonomies (more on that later). Within the categories and subcategories, you will have a number of blog posts, pages or product pages.
Internal link structure
Your linking structure is of great importance. Each page in the top of a pyramid should link to its subpages. And vice versa, all the subpages should link back to the pages on top of the pyramid. There should be essential content (cornerstone articles) at the top of your pyramid, and these should be the articles you link to from all of your blog posts.
Because you’re linking from pages that are closely related to each other content-wise, you’re increasing your site’s possibility to rank. Linking this way will help search engines by showing them what’s related. In addition to that, with all subpages linking to that one main page at the very top of your pyramid, you are creating cornerstone pages. This will make it easy for search engines to determine what your main pages per subject are.
Taxonomies and tags
Your site will also benefit from adding tags. Tags and taxonomies will give your site more structure (or at least Google will understand it better).
Don’t create too many tags. If every post or article receives yet another new unique tag, you are not structuring anything. Make sure tags are used more than once or twice. They should group articles together that belong together.
Cornerstone content
Content pages of essential importance are called cornerstone content. Cornerstone articles are the most important articles on your website.
Cornerstone articles should be relatively high in your site structure, focusing on the most ‘head’ and competitive keywords. Think of four specific pages you would like someone to read in order to tell them about your site or company: these would need to be the cornerstone articles. In most cases, the homepage would link to these articles.
IF THIS ANSWER WERE USEFUL MARK IT AS A GOOD ANSWER
Source
The Ultimate Guide to Site Structure > Yoast
How to Create a Site Structure That Will Enhance SEO > Kissmetrics -
Hello,
Good internal link structure is very important. It help pass "PageRank" and the "Tags" used in the internal links also help to show Google which pages you think are important for the keywords used in your links.
Also getting good links to the internal pages from other sites is also very important to raise your "Trust" and "PageRank" scores for the various internal pages.
Best Regards
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
-
Google Search Console Not Indexing Pages
Hi there! I have a problem that I was hoping someone could help me with. On google search console, my website does not seem to be indexed well. In fact, even after rectifying problems that Moz's on-demand crawl has pointed out, it still does not become "valid". There are some of the excluded pages that Google has pointed out. I have rectified some of the issues but it doesn't seem to be helping. However, when I submitted the sitemap, it says that the URLs were discoverable, hence I am not sure why they can be discovered but are not deemed "valid". I would sincerely appreciate any suggestions or insights as to how can I go about to solve this issue. Thanks! Screenshot+%28341%29.png Screenshot+%28342%29.png Screenshot+%28343%29.png
Algorithm Updates | | Chowsey0 -
Why google is not visiting any website from past 10 days
Hi, I observed why Google is not visiting www.SubhaVastu.com from past 10 days, later I checked thoroughly, not only for my site, google stopped visiting all websites from past 10/12 days. Is Google releasing any new updates to the crawler? Any new system is releasing soon. I am expecting Google updated their crawler by this Sunday night and it may visit as usual to all sites from 12-midnight pacific time. Has anyone observed it, any information regarding on this Google step. Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | SubhaVaastu0 -
What do media queries have to do with the page layout update?
Who thinks the lack of media queries will have an impact on whether the page layout update affects a site?
Algorithm Updates | | kimmiedawn0 -
How does this site rank no 1 for big terms with no optimisation?
Hi, A client recently asked me abut a site that appears to have popped up out of nowhere and is ranking for big terms within their industry: http://bit.ly/11jcpky I have looked at the site for a particular term: Cheap Beds I was using unpersonalised search on google.co.uk with location set to London. The site currently ranks no 1 for that term and other similar terms. The question is how? SEO Moz reports no backlinks (they must have blocked?) Ahrefs and Majestic report report some backlinks but not many and no anchor text with the term in. The Page title and meta do not contain the term nor does the page seem to contain the term anywhere. The domain does have some age though has no keyword match in the URL. I'm a little stumped to how they are achieving these results. Any Ideas Anyone?
Algorithm Updates | | JeusuDigital0 -
Correct usage of expired pages -410 or not?
Hi Mozzes, We're running a property portal that carries around 200.000 listings in two languages. All listings are updated several times per day and when one of our ads expire we report this via the "410 Gone", and place a link to our users: This ad has expired, click here to search for similar properties. Looking at our competition I seems that here are many different ways to deal with this, one popular being a 301 to the corresponding search result. We've tried to get directions from Google on what method they prefere, but as usual dead silence. Advices are mostly welcome.
Algorithm Updates | | PropertyPortal0 -
What do you think Google analyzes for SERP ranking?
I've been doing some research trying to figure out how the Google algorithm works. The one thing that is constant is that nothing is constant. This makes me believe that Google takes a variable that all sites have and divides it by that number. One example would be taking the load time in MS and dividing it by the total number or points the website scored. This would give all of the websites a random appearance since there that variable would throw off all the other constants. I'm going to continue doing research but I was wondering what you guys think matters in the Google Algorithm. -Shane
Algorithm Updates | | Seoperior0 -
Website taken a hit?
We have recently (yesterday 12<sup>th</sup> April) taken a hit for our main keywords it seems that there is no constant fall but it seems to be the most competitive words as anything that ranked purely on content still seems to rank which makes me assume that we have just lost a lot of power from links (are SEO did build quite a few links from article sites he also built a few blog network links which we did not know till we got the webmaster message 3 weeks ago (24<sup>th</sup> may) and we have made him remove them all but some still show which a) he can’t contact or b) were scrapers). But on the other hand we still have decent on site content and some good links from graphic design blogs (review articles) which would suggest a penalty as some sites with poor links and poor on site content are outranking us for a couple of our good keywords. I cannot decide if this is a penalty, keyword anchor text penalty (this is wiping more power out than the bad links) or just devaluation of links (but as said before our good links are still much more powerful than the competitors out ranking us and with our content we should easily not have lost many places). If I was going to come up with an idea it would be like the bad links have taken twice there power away from the site, so our on site content is still good but compared to medium on site and crap links they are out ranking us. (we did use a lot of anchor text with keywords in) If this is the case if we build gooad quality review links, press releases and make them more natural not go for normal link building – articles ect would this help and has anyone ever dealt with this before and have any idea how to know what is happing and how long it might take to recover.
Algorithm Updates | | BobAnderson0 -
Gifts.com - Multiple domain pages in SERPs
One of our big natural search competitors for gift keywords is Gifts.com. We are competing for many keywords like "teen gifts", "gifts for him", "gifts for her". For many of these, the Google SERP has multiple Gifts.com pages on the first page. I have never seen more than one of our pages (uncommongoods.com) on a SERP page. Any clue how/why Gifts.com has multiple pages in search results ? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | znotes0