Impact of Internal VS Inbound Links

[Dan-Petrovic]

Internal linking channels juice being accumulated through inbound links and the two work as a team. I am interested to hear from those who have either tested or have a fairly good gut feeling about the impact of internal links on rankings (as an additional signal).

Also in your opinion how does internal linking compare to external links pointing to the same page (e.g. impact of benefit/ranking gained through internal linking + inbound links as opposed to scenario where there is no relevant internal links at all).

Conditions:

• Relevant anchor text used (or close contextual variation)
• Measuring impact on a single phrase (or relevant phrase variation)
• Internal links can be from unlimited pages on the same site (even site-wide)
• External inbound links can be only to the target page (disregarding inbound links to other pages).
• Disregarding layout based navigation as internal links and focusing on content based links only (contextual, editorial links).

For example:

• Internal link ranking impact: 10%
• External link ranking impact: 90%

Since this is a simplified model feel free to provide necessary clarifications below your estimate.

Looking forward to your answers!

[StalkerB]

I can provide you with a little anecdote but I think internal linking is a reasonably large factor, especially from the home page.

So I have a page, 3 levels deep, absolute tail end of my site and exists exclusively to catch the keyword it's targeting; doesn't provide any information you can't get elsewhere on the site, doesn't have any exclusive offers, just another page on the site.

So I build a few links into this page, nothing exciting; articles, links from my blog posts, manage to find a couple of websites about the topic, but after 3 months, nothing, top 50 ranking (from 120 or so) but not that great. However one day I get a conversion from it, so I decide I'm going to give it a little push and link to it with the main keyword from the homepage.

Boom! Next day, 7th.

The homepage itself isn't that powerful, very low page rank, very few links coming in and there's already about 100 links on it between the nav and the other editorial style links. It's not that the page I linked to wasn't being crawled or indexed but putting a link in from the homepage instantly boosted it.

2 months later the page still fluctuates within the top 10, but I have been building more links into it.

So, flush with this new success I decide to test it on another, very similar, site. Same sort of page, same sort of keyword, same sort of site structure. Difference this time is that I'm not building links to the page in question.

Keyword isn't top hundred so I put the link in from the home page.

Boom! Top 80.

Alright, not as good but a definite twitch. I figure that it's not quite the magic bullet I thought it was (and realistically I can't link to every page from my home page anyway) and haven't really revisited what would happen if I did build links to that page (and a few more to the homepage).

So, anecdotally, internal linking from recent pages and small time link building doesn't do much. Linking from the homepage is a big signal that a page is important. Without external links your internal linking (on a small / low DA website) isn't going to rank you.

I'm going to say it's closer to 20/80 though.

[Julich]

IMHO, internal linking optimization really worth it when your website has reached a pretty large scale (several thousands of pages). More especially, internal linking can have a very great impact if your website provides local content. See real estate websites such as Zillow, Trulia & co. They can rank very well on local searches without having external backlinks on their pages, just because they have a powerful root domain + an excellent internal linking.

[Dan-Petrovic]

Hi Dave, thanks, I am familiar with that article. I am interested in people's personal opinion.

[blackballonline]

You may want to check this awesome resource - The Professionals Guide to PageRank Optimization