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
-
Seeing some really bad sites that ranked in my niche years ago reaching 1st page
It started after the update about 4 websites form the 1st page dropped to the 2nd and 4 of the other sites just popped back to the 1st page and the bad part is that the Da and inbound links of these sites are really bad, so my question is must we just wait this out till Google realises how bad these site are and some of them haven't been updated in years links broken i can go on and on. what these sites have is just the age of the domains, but can this really be the main focus of these results?
Algorithm Updates | | johan80 -
What happens when most of the website visitors end up at an "noindex" log-in page?
Hi all, As most of the users are visiting our website for log-in, we are planning to deindex login page. As they cannpt find it on SERP, they gonna visit our website and login; I just wonder what happens when most of the visitors just end up at homepage by browsing into an "noindex" page. Obviously it increases bounce rate and exit rate as they just gonna disappear. Is this going to push down us in rankings? What are the other concerns to check about? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Ranking drop after image compression across website.
Hi all, Just checked my website in Google pagespeed insights and most of our website pages were required to reduce the images file size for better page loading. So I have compressed the images using https://compressor.io/ and https://tinypng.com/ and replaced the images. Then surprisingly ranking dropped even score improved for all pages with image optimisation. What would be the reason? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Ahrefs - What Causes a Drastic Loss in Referring Pages?
While I was doing research on UK Flower companies I noticed that one particular domain had great rankings (top 3), but has slid quite a bit down to page two. After investigating further I noticed that they had a drastic loss of referring pages, but an increase in total referring domains. See this screenshot from ahrefs. I took a look at their historical rankings (got them from the original SEO provider's portfolio) and compared it to the Wayback Machine. There did not seem to be any drastic changes in the site structure. My question is what would cause such a dramatic loss in total referring pages while showing a dramatic increase in referring domains? It appears that the SEO company was trying rebound from the loss of links though. Any thoughts on why this might happen? 56VD5jD
Algorithm Updates | | AaronHenry0 -
How to use MOZ to improve my website
Hi, I am new for MOZ, have no idea how to improve my website with the function of MOZ, can anyone share their experience for using MOZ service. the more detail the better! Thanks a lot in advance! John Thanks for helps for everyone, it took me some time to read each answer, and also spend few days to study MOZ. My initial conclusion is the function of MOZ is to promote the idea of SEO, but not provide any specific SEO service for specific website except for some tools and report. So I am missing or misunderstanding MOZ's service, it will be always welcome to help me out by correcting my opinion. Anyway, thanks again for all the time you've given to me, and good to you all! -John.
Algorithm Updates | | Steplead1 -
Top 5 most optimized websites
Throwing this question out to the community but was wondering if anyone can direct me on how I can find the top 5 or 10 ten sites that have been most optimized for search engines. Meaning which web sites have the best reputation when it comes to website optimization for search engines or is there a resource where I can read about websites that have been ranked as the best when it comes to following best practices and have constantly ranked well within their industry? Figured it's always a good idea to learn from the best by looking at what they are doing. Thank you.
Algorithm Updates | | DRTBA2 -
New Blog Post Ranking Fluctuation
I wrote a recent blog post on Friday. It was indexed and ranked on the first page on Monday. On Wednesday, it was nowhere to be found. I noticed that, after a few more recent posts, it was on page two of my blog. So I expanded my results so that it was back on my first page. Today, it is back on the first page - same spot as before. Was that my problem, or could it be something else I am unaware of?
Algorithm Updates | | BMac540 -
Some rankings fluctuate dramatically
Hi guys, just a quick query this one. For one of our keywords, the rankings are fluctuating wildly. One week we went up 32 spots, then the next friday we were down 28. Nothing dramatic was being done to the site, I have not been trying to "force" any rankings instead focusing on just making our content better. It just seems odd that one week we're on page one, then a few days later we're down on page four. It seems impossible to actually maintain a reliable ranking. I know to expect some fluctuation but every week it's up 20/30, then down 20/30 the next. How can we try to give this keyword some stability? Ideas?
Algorithm Updates | | JetBookMike0