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[snakeaconda]

I've got me an e-commerce site, selling one e-book. I'm trying to string together a plan for internal linking, but having a hard time finding info for smaller sites.

On the main site, there's about 5 pages, basically only 2 pages are important for page rank, the main page and the bio/about page. The rest of the pages are terms, privacy, contact. So I have a sitewide nav bar on every single page, that basically links to every other page. Is this OK? Especially when I'm gonna use rel=nofollow and robots to block the unimportant pages?

I've got anchor text in the links to the 2 important pages, should I change this text around in the links coming from each different page?

Linking to the page you're already on is a no-no, right? Example, having a link to index.html in the nav bar of the index.html file?

I also have a blog, and a shopping cart to sell the product, both set up as subdomains. Should I only link to these from the main pages (for pagerank concerns)?

I want the shopping cart to pop up in a new window. So I'll have to use javascript and/or "target=_blank" within the link code. Does this render the entire link immune to spidering?

I don't expect to get these questions all covered, but answers to any one of these issues will help immensely.

Thanks
Rick

[torka]

With those few pages, I wouldn't really expect one style of internal linking versus another to make enough difference to make the amount of energy you're expending on the issue worthwhile. In other words, for a site of this size, you're way overthinking this.

A target attribute won't have any effect on a link's spiderability. Javascript is only a problem if the JS writes the URL; as long as there's a clean URL in the "href" part of the link, you should be fine.

Also from a usability standpoint, why do you want the shopping cart to pop up in a window? With only one product, it's unlikely the customer will need/want to return to the site to "continue shopping," and opening the cart in a pop up isn't necessarily the behavior the visitor will expect. I honestly don't remember shopping at any major retailer online where the shopping cart opens in a pop up window.

Site wide navigation is perfectly acceptable. Many small sites link every page to every other page with no problems whatsoever. It's pretty much expected this will be the case for small sites.

Linking to the page you're already on is a no-no for usability. The search engines won't care. Those links won't do anything for you in terms of SEO, but they do have the potential to confuse your human visitors who click on them expecting to go somewhere else, only to stay on the page they're already on. Confusing your human visitors (you know, the ones who -- unlike search engine spiders -- carry credit cards and sometimes buy things) is generally not a good idea.

There are some indications the search engines won't count more than one link to a given target page from any given source page. Meaning that if you put three links to your blog from your home page, it could be that only the first one the search engine finds in the code may "count." Or potentially the second and third link might "count" but for less than the first.

So don't count on taking a bunch of links from one page to another and having them all count equally in your favor.

Using appropriate and relevant link anchor text, link when and where and how it makes sense for your human visitors.

My

--Torka