Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Homepage Vs. Inner Page Backlink Building?
-
If I'm trying to rank multiple inner pages, when does strengthening the homepage become more productive than strengthening the inner pages themselves? Is there a strategy to this?
For example, maybe you build up a few dozen backlinks to each inner page, and then focus all your efforts on the homepage?
Because, from my understanding, strengthening the homepage will go a long way towards helping your inner pages rank. Is that correct?
-
Strengthening the home page with inbound branded links, and mixed commercialized / brand links from editorial / high quality sources builds authority, which as Perfect007 mentioned, distributes 'weight' throughout the website.
This improved domain authority tends to move relevant associated topics within the website up in rankings more than non-related areas. For example, the more tightly knit the homepage is to the categories that comprise it, the more inbound link building to the homepage impacts those pages.
At the same time, link building to strategic inner pages moves the needle as well, and reinforces authority to associated related sub categories and 'sister' categories in the website.
As a basic rule of thumb, competition being equal - the further apart your inner categories are insofar as relations, the more authority you need to build at the base level (root, homepage) in order to move inner categories forward.
Hope this helps.
-
yes your understanding is correct, building links to your home page will increase your domain authority over time and domain authority is defined as (paraphrasing) 'the likelihood of new content on your site to rank'.
That being said, every site owner has pages they'd like to showcase and more importantly, ensure that the page is getting good SERP placement. For that deep linking is critical. If you don't deep link, Google will sometimes display your home page as the url for a keyword that you'd have preferred go to an internal page.
For instance if you want your home page to rank for 'Widgets' and you want MySIte.com/purple-widgets/ to rank for 'Purple Widgets', your better off deep linking with 'purple widget' related (for link diversity purposes) anchor text to your interior pages. This will help you make sure your home page doesn't rank for 'Purple Widgets'.
-
I believe if you are building links the right way and promoting your brand as well you will see links coming to your home page automatically mostly because of your brand name visibility in the target market.
I believe you should focus on building links to pages that contain quality no matter if they are inner pages, non commercial pages or anything else...
-
Home page backlinks will distribute the link juice on whole inner page. Most of the time home page gets backlinks because of the most prompt page of the website. But it also depends on the most relevant link concept. If your inner page is best relevant for getting any backlink then you should choose inner one.
But most of the backlink provider resources(directory, forum signature etc.) prefer home page of websites.
-
It has a lot to do with the kind of website that you have.
In general you want to get a lot of links to the pages that you want to get found on. (blog posts, product pages etcetera)
But in general the homepage gets the most links because when people see your website and they like it the homepage is the most logical URL to link to.Strengthening the home page will be helpful to your site because the homepage should be your content hub. You can find more information about content hubs, website architecture and a lot more here: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-rank
Hope i answered your question
Let me know if you have any other questions or if i was unclear about something.
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
-
Nofollow backlinks - are they worth it?
As we all attempt to get backlinks for the sites we manage, I have to wonder if it's worth it at all to get a nofollow backlink. Does Google give and positive credit for a link to a site if it is a nofollow link? Obviously, the follow links are worth pursuing. I'm just trying to gain some perspective. Thanks, Wick
Link Building | | wcksmith10 -
Are Sidebar Backlinks worth for SEO?
Hello! Let's use the following example: I have a blog (let's call it Blog A) and I find another blog in the same niche (this will be Blog B) that has higher DA and PA than mine. Will Google penalize me if the Blog B puts a link to my blog in their sidebar? Remember, the Blog A and Blog B are from the same niche. I ask this because Google says that links on sidebars appears in every page and in some pages the link may be useless. But if both blogs are from the same niche, there won't be pages where the links will be from different themes and with less relevance. So, is my thought correct: we can use sidebar links without caring about penalization ONLY if the blogs are from the same niche? Thanks in advance!
Link Building | | btqkelvin0 -
Rankings Dropped After New Backlinks.
I have a low-traffic website (under 100 unique visitors per day) and I've encountered a strange issue started yesterday morning. I acquired three back-links, one of these back-links is contextual and the other two are site-wide. The site-wide back-links are from PA 40+ blogs. It looks like the back-links are already indexed by Google. Despite these new back-links, my rankings across multiple keywords have dropped several positions. I'm new to SEO, but I would assume new back-links would improve my rankings. None of these back-links are low quality links, they are from real established blogs with high domain and page authority values. Could anyone give me insights into why my rankings may have dropped with new back-links?
Link Building | | poke11 -
Spammy no follow backlinks - what should I do?
There is a individual/company that is creating lots of spam sites in my niche. It doesn't seem that they are trying to rank for any keywords, so I'm a little confused as to their purpose, but here's what they're doing. They scrape the top 10 Google results for each keyword and create a page - so if the niche is "widgets", they scrape the top 10 ranked sites for 'widgets', 'blue widgets', 'red widgets', and so on. A 'results' page is created for each keyword, which is linked from a home page. The results page always contains 10 websites - text is the site metadescription or similar. Each website gets a nofollow link back with the page title used as the anchor text. The host sites all have the keyword in the domain name - e.g www.widgetsxyz.com. The sites are thrown together but interestingly have a very crappy but individual logo (like 90's clipart). The host sites all have high DA/PA due to some very extensive link spam pointing to the sites, with very targeted keywords. There is seemingly no purpose to these sites that I can see - no other 'followed' links on the page or site. Whoever is doing this is churning out tens, if not hundreds of these sites. Any ideas what might be going on here, and whether I should be disavowing these sites (even though no follow). The fear is that they could switch the links to do follow, and get all the major players penalised in one fell swoop. ???
Link Building | | johnohara0 -
DA vs PA when building links
When building links to your site from other sites, what is more important or what weights more heavily? Say a site has a DA of 20 and PA of 34 for that page I want a link from. Say another site has the revese, a DA of 34 and a PA of 20. All things being equal, which site's link to me would be better? The one with a higher DA or the one with a higher PA for the on the specific page I would get a link?
Link Building | | studio35design0 -
Backlinks through dofollow commenting
I'm interested in building backlinks to my photography business site by leaving good, engaging comments on other photographers' DoFollow blogs. Is this a good idea? Is it worth the effort? Through a little research, I've managed to locate more than 40 dofollow photographer blogs that have a domain authority of 35+. The idea is to take an hour or so a week to leave 10-20 comments on their blog posts. Would you consider this a good strategy? I rank on the first and second page of most of my keywords that I'm working on, but I want to rank 1st or 2nd on them. I used the keyword finder tool on google adwords to find the keywords that are the most searched for in my area. Surprisingly the competition is not large, so I'm fairly comfident I can get there. I've already optimized my site substantially and I'm looking into link building. Thoughts?
Link Building | | studio35design0 -
Does this count as a backlink to my category page?
I am ranking high with a certain category page and I am reading that I need backlinks to that page. It is going to be a challenge to get a backlink to that specific category page but how about this? Category page URL: www.mysite.com/category/name Backlink to this URL: www.mysite.com/category/name/specific-blog-post (EDIT: Apparently these types of links don't exist! I went into the category page and clicked on a blog post and it just gave me the www.mysite.com/blah-blah-blah) Will that count as a backlink to the category page? Right now I am only getting backlinks to these blog posts: www.mysite.com/this-is-a-blog-post Any help appreciated! EDIT: Well I guess now my question is worthless. But if you have any input, it would be appreciated.
Link Building | | dealblogger0 -
Why is my homepage ranking BELOW a subpage?
Search "peer to peer lending". The page http://www.ratesetter.com/peer_to_peer_lending.htm appears higher than the homepage. I don't think this is because of keyword density on page either as Zopa (competitor) have zero mentions of this keyword on their homepage. What are your suggestions for getting the homepage ranked higher? Thanks, Simon.
Link Building | | RateSetter0