Should my backlinks point to my home page or to internal article pages?
-
Hi,
I run a fitness blog and I get the majority of my backlinks through guest posts that I write on high quality sites. Sometimes they allow me to put a backlink within the article, and I'll link it to a relevant article of mine. However, in the "author bio" section my backlink anchor text is usually just my brand name. I was wondering if this backlink should point towards my home page or is it more beneficial to point it towards an important article of mine?
Thanks
-
I would view this a a usability matter. Where would someone expect to land after clicking on a link in an author bio? I would likely expect to land on your home page, or a good About me page.
Chances are, if it's a well set up bio section, it will be a nofollow link. So there won't be any benefits other than to the user who clicks on it.
~Caro
-
Jeremy,
The correct answer to your question is that it needs to look natural. I wouldn't necessarily optimize the anchor text and the link so that it's pointing to one particular page or even your home page with certain anchor text.
If it's your author bio, then naturally it should point to your site's home page. An alternative would be to create/write a page specifically for your author bio (where you list your articles that you've written).
-
Hi Jeremy,
There isn't really a "correct" answer to this one.
Links help with your rankings regardless of where they are sent. The fact that these links are coming from high-authority sites is probably the biggest benefit, regardless of anchor text or link pathway.
On the flipside, you probably want to try to create relevancy between the page you are linking from and the page you are linking to. For example, as a fitness expert, if you are providing information on proper stretch technique or diet, then you may want to target pages on your website that feature stretching or diet respectively. Your author bio links might link to an "About" page on your website since people who click on your author bio might be looking to learn more about you (creates UX as well as website traffic since they are finding what they are looking for with 1 click). The Home Page is also an option since it provides greater link juice throughout the site, but your referral traffic drop-off might increase as a result.
As for sites that allow links within the content itself, you can go the Home Page linking route if you want since that helps with general rankings across your site. That being said, Home Pages don't convert people, landing pages do.
My personal opinion is you choose link pages on your site according to keywords you want to rank for and based on their relevancy to your guest post topics. It's better to drive targeted traffic to relevant pages rather than bring general traffic to your home page.
There are a lot of different ways to look at this, but technical SEO is giving way more and more to user experience and relevant link channels, so I would be less worried about pounding your home page with links and more about ensuring your users have a good experience on your site - that's how you get returning traffic and repeat visitors.
Good luck moving forward!
Cheers,
Rob
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
-
Links to sub pages
Hi, if I am building links to pages outside of my home page, is that link still a referring domain. Also, does that link also help the SEO of the keywords targeted on the home page. Most of our links are home page targeted and we need to start ranking on subpages but need to know if these links only help the page they are aimed at
Link Building | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
HTTS vs HTTPS Backlinks
So I am going to change my entire site from HTTP to HTTPS, but SEMrush shows 21 backlinks on HTTP and 0 on HTTPS. How can I make sure I don't lose them after the switch?
Link Building | | moon-boots0 -
Is it worth 301 redirecting an old backlink from a 404 to a landing page?
I was reviewing the 404 report in webmaster tools, when I found a 404 back link from a 10 year old forum topic on a very high DA site. It seems the poster did a direct hotlink to a pdf that was on our site a very long time ago, but is now gone so you get a standard "can not be found" page on our site. Is it now worth redirecting the url to an appropriate landing page, considering the age of the post/ link and the sites DA, or is it not worth it because of the age of the link, its a forum, and we are still getting some juice from it anyway despite it being a 404, and won't get much more out of it. Just want to know it good practice if I find many such links (very old links to now 404 pages) Thanks
Link Building | | PaddyDisplays0 -
How do I find what backlinks have disappeared?
I have seen a decrease in backlinks, how do I figure out which ones are no longer there?
Link Building | | EcommerceSite0 -
Internal links
hey guys, these days should internal links within your site carry no-follow tags? or does it really matter? thanks!!
Link Building | | tm46150 -
Links on a search page
On search page (listing products) we may have more than one link for the sameproduct : a link on the title of each product a link on each image's product a link on a "buy" button What is the best practice for this ? Link obfuscation? Do nothing special ?
Link Building | | ouicar1 -
Ecommerce - Discussion of Article Topics
Hello, My client is in a boring niche, not a lot of people linking anywhere. He needs good traffic within 3 and a half months. After listening to people here at seomoz, we're making five 5000-10000 word articles on topics that are useful to the customer we can promote The client is writing the information out himself and then a professional writer is going to put the final article together. We'll keep working it until it's a best-of-the-web The most useful article we have come up with is all the details about "How to select a product" There's definitely enough information for an article there. But we need to be able to promote one of the articles, and the thing that is most linked to that I've found are articles about the problems that the products solve. An article on that wouldn't be as useful to our customers. Your thoughts?
Link Building | | BobGW0 -
Good article distribution services?
Our site has a lot of content we are able to modify/distribute without too much time so I am planning to syndicate some of this using article distribution. Apart from Ezine articles, are there any other article distribution services I should/could consider using? I do know that I should also be focussing most of my resource on building high-quality links through guest blogs etc! However this seems like a relatively quick win. Thanks in advance
Link Building | | GBC0