Ok. I'm just going to cut loose with my stupid question. What is internal link equity? What distinguishes an internal link with equity from one without equity?

[wrconard]

What distinguishes an internal link with equity from one without equity? Is there a limit to how many of these I want? What's the rule-of-thumb?

Cheers,

Wes

[wrconard]

Hi Evan:

My apologies for the slow response. Thanks for the simple explanation and for the link. That is the most thorough explanation of links that i've found. Much appreciated.

-W

[evan89]

Hey Wes,

There are diminishing returns, especially if you have many links on a given page. If you think of a page's authority as a pie, the more pieces you slice the pie into (being the more links you have on a page) the linking page will receive a smaller piece of that pie (passed authority).

If you are trying to sort what is important vs what is not, it is important to thing of why links are important. Links are how bots crawl the web. Internal links are important because they help bots crawl your website, and find the content that is important.

*Note: there is a lot more to be said about this. Here is a good article for you: http://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link

[wrconard]

Hi Evan:

Thanks very much for your note. That makes sense. I assume there's a point of diminishing returns where an excess of internal linking works against you. I see a lot of companies where most of their links are internal. If you have a few hundred internal links with equity, is that really significant in terms of boosting your DA or your ranking? There are so many measurements I'm trying to sort out what is significant and what is not.

Thanks very much.

Wes

[evan89]

Also, I might add that there are no stupid questions on Moz

[evan89]

Internal link equity refers to the "link juice" passed internally (on your domain) when you link within your own site. If you have links that are set as nofollow, they will not pass link equity.

If you have a FOLLOW link, then it will pass some link equity. If you have pages that have more links, or are more authoritative on your site, they will pass more link equity than pages that are buried deep within your site.

I hope that this helps. It is a quick answer, but let me know if you have any further questions.