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
-
PDFs With No Index Contribute To Page Ranks?
I have a question I'm hoping you can help me with. If I upload a PDF and add a no index under the meta robots index so that the PDF doesn't appear in search results when I send people the link to this PDF, does it still contribute to my site traffic/ranking etc? Basically we are deciding whether to put some PDFs with pricing options etc onto our website or on a google drive. We will be sending the links to potential clients. If visitors clicking on the link would still help with increasing traffic and increasing our google rank (without that PDF showing in results) we thought this might be the best solution.
Algorithm Updates | | whiterabbitnz0 -
Website have Caching/Indexing / Ranking Issue
Hi, My Website (https://www.v3cars.com) is not cached or indexed on regular basic from last 15 days. before this it was cached or indexed on regular basic. We are uploading fresh content on daily basic. Currently my new content is not ranked anywhere in Google even after cached or indexed. Please help and suggest. Sandeep - Love to Cars
Algorithm Updates | | onlinesandeep0 -
Intermittent ranking drops.. up and down and once again..
So.. For the last several weeks (I noticed March 11th), we are having some weird ranking drops. Our keywords will drop overnight from their usual position between 2-6 to further than 200 and then be back to normal a couple days later. We use Sheerseo to track daily ranking. I track about 15 KW everyday and noticed it happening then. Is this part of the recent changes? I am just really puzzled that we are seeing drops and then going back to normal and then drops again. It is hard to know where you stand with such drastic differences day to day. Any ideas?
Algorithm Updates | | CassisGroup0 -
Help with local Seo?
Hi, I am really struggling with current predicament i find myself in. I am a small to medium sized business based in Newcastle in the UK and am trying to rank well locally for the keywords that i feel my customers will be searching for locally. I have got to the stage where i am on page 1 of google uk or nearly there but cannot compete against the national companies who have the search terms then just add pages for virtually every city in the country. For example my main product is "Artificial Grass" and my city/town is Newcastle This is where my office is and where my customers are. This is also where my google places page states. Now theres a company that sells Artificial Grass called www.asgoodasgrass.co.uk that are based no where near but use the power of there site to come up in every local search by adding a page "Artificial Grass Newcastle" as well as hundreds of others. They rank 3rd and im 8th. There actual Newcastle page is poor, where as i put everything into my page including pics, video etc. Still no joy. I feel i am always going to rank behind these big boys even though i am the actual local company and have no intention of working others area that are not local to me. By the time i rank behind the above type companies and the likes of yell.com i feel i am never going to be seen and fall back on expensive adwords to help me along. I am a complete newbie at this and would love any help or tips you could give to give me a fighting chance in my area. My site is www.totaldrivewaysne.co.uk incase you want to look as you will have gathered my other primary product is driveways for which also i feel like i have a million competitors! many many thanks for any responses John
Algorithm Updates | | totaldriveways0 -
Correlation of Rankings with Personal Pronouns?
Has there been any tests or studies that associate writing in the first person or using "emotional" feeling phrases to higher rankings. More specifically to a blog structure. I'm trying a blog option with a local telecommunications company, however I'm having flashbacks of writing those 5 paragraph essays when taking the SATs. The owner decided he should take on the responsibility and it's like he just can't bring himself to write from a personal perspective. He's a bit stuck in the "professional" mindset and worried about appearing unprofessional. I empathize with his perspective, but I know it's not going to work..or maybe it will? it's just not going to be interesting to readers, but perhaps google will appreciate the fresh content. I don't think letting an employee takeover will be an option as he's very protective of the company's image. So would you ditch the blog? or continue with the dull posts?
Algorithm Updates | | squareplug0 -
Why bing is not indexing our website?
We are up almost a six month already, google indexed 46,900 pages. We have decent traffic and a lot of real external links to us. No single page has been indexed by bing or yahoo. I have submitted sitemap to bing's webmaster tool two weeks ago and still it is in Pending stage. here is our address: www.showme.com and here is site map: http://www.showme.com/sitemapxml.php What can be the reason of that? Thanks for your help. Karen Bdoyan
Algorithm Updates | | showme0 -
Is there a way to pull historical rankings for a keyword?
I have someone who's come to me and said that they have lost all of their organic keyword rankings. They did launch a site redesign a few months back so that could be a reason as to why. But after looking at the site, link profile, etc. It doesn't look like they could have been ranking for the terms they say they were. They have never implemented any SEO on their sites btw. I did not build this site and have not done any SEO, they are coming to me to solve the problem. I did notice in SEM rush that a couple months ago they were ranking organically for more terms (20 in July vs. 5 now), so they did lose some. Is there any way to see what terms they WERE ranking for?
Algorithm Updates | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
Site Usage Statistics and organic ranking
I'm not sure if anyone has tested this properly but i'm begining to suspect that google is using site usage statistics as a site quality guide and ultimately as a ranking variable. The this what i've seen so far on one of my sites (site A) Week 1= bounce rate (83.88%), Avg time on site (0:0:57), Pages/visit (1.28) no changes made to the site apart from the usual link building. Week 2: Traffic drops by 30%, Keywords generating traffic drops by 39%. Bounce rate (87.25%), Avg time on site (0:0:43), pages/visit (1.21). I replaced all affiliate links on my homepage to internal pages where the chunk of the content is and did a reconsideration request. Week 3: Traffic goes up by 30%, keywords generating traffic goes up by 65%, Bounce rate (30.41%), Avg time on site (0:3:02), Pages/visit (3.74). This is not the most scientific test but surely google must be using these variables and a ranking factor? Anyone seen something along these lines or have thoughts on it?
Algorithm Updates | | clickangel0