Hi,

I have a question regarding the power of internal links and how much link juice they pass, and how they influence search engine ranking positions.

If we take the example of an ecommerce store that sells kites.

Scenario 1

It can be assumed that it is easier for the kite ecommerce store to earn links to its homepage from writing great content on its blog, as any blogger that will link to the content will likely use the site name, and homepage as anchor text.

So if we follow this through, then it can be assumed that there will eventually be a large number of high quality backlinks pointing to the sites homepage from various high authority blogs that love the content being posted on the sites blog.

The question is how much link juice does this homepage pass to the category pages, and from the category pages then to the product pages, and what influence does this have on rankings?

I ask because I have seen strong ecommerce sites with very strong DA or domain PR but with no backlinks to the product page/category page that are being ranked in the top 10 of search results often, for the respective category and product pages.

It therefore leads me to assume that internal links must have a strong determiner on search rankings...

Could it therefore also be assumed that a site with a PR of 5 and no links to a specific product page, would rank higher than a site with a PR of 1 but with 100 links pointing to the specific product page? Assuming they were both trying to rank for the same product keyword, and all other factors were equal. Ie. neither of them built spammy links or over optimised anchor text?

Scenario 2

Does internal linking work both ways?

Whereas in my above example I spoke about the homepage carrying link juice downward to the inner category and product pages. Can a powerful inner page carry link juice upward to category pages and then the homepage.

For example, say the blogger who liked the kite stores blog content piece linked directly to the blog content piece from his site and the kite store blog content piece was hosted on www.xxxxxxx.com/blog/blogcontentpiece

As authority links are being built to this blog content piece page from other bloggers linking to it, will it then pass link juice up to the main blog category page, and then the kite sites main homepage?

And if there is a link with relevant anchor text as part of the blog content piece will this cause the link juice flowing upwards to be stronger?

I know the above is quite winded, but I couldn't find anywhere that explains the power of internal linking on SERP's...

Look forward to your replies on this....