11 replies to this topic

[RiYo]

Hi all,

I need to give a presentation about linkage (inbound and internal). About Inbound Linkages I have enough information, but are there any strategies or tips that you can recommend that I use for the Internal Linkage?

Thanks in advance

Richard

[Blogologist]

The really quick version from me (I'm no guru):

1. Create a sitemap page, and include it as a link in your main menu. Call it "sitemap.html" (use whatever extension you use).

2. Link to the sitemap again from a footer menu or create a sitemap link at the bottom of your HTML on ALL pages of your site. By "bottom", I mean as close to the closing BODY tag as possible... the last A tag on the page, ideally.

3. Make sure your sitemap page updates automatically whenever new content is added to your site.

4. Have NO outbound links on the sitemap page, if possible.

5. Minimize the number of links in your main menu, and ensure all are inbound links only. One should link to your homepage (it's ok for it to be labelled "home" or somesuch) and that one should have your main keyword/s in the TITLE attribute of that link.

6. Your homepage should also have as few outbound links as possible, or a ratio of 5:1 inbound/outbound links (say).

7. All pages on your site should have a footer link (again, as close to the closing BODY tag as possible) pointing back to your homepage, but this time the anchor text itself should be the primary site keywords, and your site name as well, if you want.

8. Limit your site "depth" to three levels if you can. Blogs do this well: homepage -> category/archive level -> page/post level.

9. To limit duplicate content use a robots.txt page to forbid access to the kinds of pages that are just repeats of content which is displayed in full elsewhere, and which people are not likely to link to. So on a blog, for example, you would disallow category, archive and tag pages. These are all duplicating post content and are not the kinds of pages people from outside will link to.

10. It follows from point 9 then, that your sitemap need not link to these "intermediate" 2nd level pages... it can link directly to the "real" content pages at level 3 using just labels/headings for the 2nd level (hope that makes sense).

Rationale:

What you're doing here is pouring as much "authority" into the sitemap page as possible, and into your homepage. You're doing this by linking to both these pages from every other page on the site, both in the main menu and in the footer. You're telling the SEs that these two pages are a really big deal.

Then your including all important internal pages on your sitemap page, so they are seen to be just one hop away from a key page (the sitemap) that is linked to from everywhere. (And your naming your sitemap page "sitemap" because I think Google is smart enough to know what that word means and treat the page accordingly.)

Personally, I don't care about nor bother with the "official" Google Sitemap XML specification, as I think the goals are well enough achieved with the above. I know it works, because I can see the fruit of it both in content rankings and in the Google Webmaster tool reports.

Other thoughts:

I personally really like the idea of "related content" links on all key content pages. This tells humans what else to go look at, but I would not be surprised if the SEs (especially Google) are savvy to this. Wordpress, for example, makes this a very simple feature to implement, with a number of plugins written to achieve this.

The value of these "related links" is to both give the reader somewhere to go after reading your page content, but also to counter/kill the PR "juice leakage" of any external links you may have included on your page. Andy Beard goes further, with a tag cloud on all his blog posts which grows in size dynamically, depending on the number of external links found on his pages (including the number of comment author links, which are do-followed).

Hope all that helps!

This is not "gospel", but it's what I *actually* do...!

-Alister

[Randy]

Well you could touch on the different types of internal linking structures, explaining the difference between them. The main two being a Tree or Pyrimid structure and a Linear structure. Most sites have a Pyramid internal linking structure, where the very top would be the home page, it then links out to second level page that links back to it and those other pages in its area. Think a family tree for a graphical idea.

Linear is the opposite. Where links run in a line but don't link back to higher levels. So one page, then another page, then another page, etc.

You could also touch on why one needs to be careful if their internal navigation is making use of Javascript. Giving examples of which is okay and which isn't. And why links written by Javascript stop the spiders in their tracks.

If it's a beginners type of get-your-feet-wet I doubt I'd go much farther than that. Maybe make a mention regarding the smart use of anchor text, but not go into any great detail.

[Jill]

Interesting suggestions, Alister, although many of them don't make any sense to me.

Why does the sitemap link have to be close to the closing body tag?

And why limit the links in your main menu? Those links are actually ON every page, as opposed to the sitemap page which you just LINK TO from every page. You are in effect giving your pages less weight with your suggestion, rather than more, as far as I can tell.

I don't see any reason to "pour authority" into a sitemap page, especially if your navigation is thorough, clear and logical. Sitemap pages contain no content and don't need nor deserve authority.

[Blogologist]

Jill,

Putting the links close to the closing BODY tag accords with the belief that Google (and possibly other SEs) expect to see copyright and other "company" stuff down there and give a certain authority to these links that they do not to links that are "buried" further up/into the page. (I can't prove that... yet!)

Limiting the number of menu links is both a usability/visual thing, and a way of ensuring that the "Google juice" is distributed as narrowly as possible. Nothing more than that. (The sitemap link is one of these, of course.)

Lastly, I may have given the wrong impression with the "authority" of the sitemap page. It's not that it has to rank (well)... it's that it has to be prominently linked to, and has to make all pages a "short hop" from all other pages, as far as the SEs are concerned.

-Alister

[Jill]

Putting the links close to the closing BODY tag accords with the belief that Google (and possibly other SEs) expect to see copyright and other "company" stuff down there and give a certain authority to these links that they do not to links that are "buried" further up/into the page. (I can't prove that... yet!)

Sorry, but my opinion on that is that it is completely false. In fact, the links at the bottom are most likely given LESS weight, not more, imo.

Lastly, I may have given the wrong impression with the "authority" of the sitemap page. It's not that it has to rank (well)... it's that it has to be prominently linked to, and has to make all pages a "short hop" from all other pages, as far as the SEs are concerned.

Yes, but isn't it a shorter hop if the pages are actually in the main navigation?

[RiYo]

Thanks all, it is very helpfull and I have already learned some new things myself .

If there is anybody else that wants to add some more thoughts ... please do so.

Richard

[Randy]

and that one should have your main keyword/s in the TITLE attribute of that link.

For completeness, I don't believe this will help one iota with the search engines. I don't have a test of the title attribute of an <a href> tag running myself, but I know others here have tested it and may still have those tests running. If I remember the gist of the results they were that the content of an a href title attribute does not appear to transfer to the target page as some might suspect. In fact, I believe the considered option was that the major search engines pretty much ignore this particular attribute.

Note: Do not confuse the title attribute of an <a href> tag with the <title> tag of a page. The <title> tag is quite important. The title attribute doesn't appear to be.

Hopefully someone will happen by who has tested it or still has a test running and can confirm my memory of this data for you.

[Jill]

I've tested it and every time I've checked, the search engines have always appeared to completely ignore the link title attribute.

[Just checked again and no search engine was indexing it still.]

[Paul Ferree]

Dan Thies wrote some really good articles on internal linking here: www.seofaststart.com/structure . You may also want to check out the free book he has...in my opinion it was better than SEOBook.

Also...this tool would be helpful for you I would imagine: www.seo4fun.com/php/pagerankbot.php and check out this article in conjunction with that: www.seo4fun.com/blog/2007/08/08/how-to-exploit-the-pagerankbot-tool.html

And then of course www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html explains a lot.

I've used this method for an ecommerce site:
1st Tier (Index) >nofollow every link except category pages
2nd Tier (Category) > links to products, links back to index, but nofollow crosslinks between categories to push all PR juice down to my products
3rd Tier (Product) > links to index, links back to categories, and crosslinks to other products, of course nofollowed the boring pages like policies, contact, about etc that won't have any value in search results.

Technically it seems to pan out right...I need to do a little more work but I'm waiting for Google to catch up to all the changes I've made. I'm just waiting around now...

Hope that helps

Paul

Edited by Randy, 03 December 2007 - 08:09 AM.
Links removed per forum rules.

[RiYo]

Well you could touch on the different types of internal linking structures, explaining the difference between them. The main two being a Tree or Pyrimid structure and a Linear structure.

Randy, in which would you use the Tree structure and when would you use the Linear structure?

thanks for your thoughts.

Richard

[Randy]

I can't think of a single time I've used a linear navigation structure Richard. My sites simply don't lend themselves to such an approach. Where I would use this approach is if I had a site where I considered every single page to be of equal importance to every other page.

A Pryamid or Tree structure is what I always seem to use. Where there are layers of pages that I think carry the same amount of importance. So in a typical e-commerce set up the home page is at the top, the main product category pages as the second level, product pages at the thrid level, etc.