Comments on: Internal Linking Strategy: SEO Self Reflection

By: Marks Diecast

Marks Diecast — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 09:47:00 +0000

Outbound links to relevant sites:
Instead of talking about it, I did it. 48 hours later, page 1 position 8 – from page 2 position 14.
Seems to work for the time being. I did this on my personal site, and withhold application to a clients’ site until further analysis.
Great piece of advice, if position holds.

By: cgmcgiffen

cgmcgiffen — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 03:44:00 +0000

Aside from the good use of well-chosen navigational aids whats the feeling about actual site structure? Should we clearly define “hub” and “info” pages on a site with our site structure and – more importantly – are they recognised by the search engines and have an effect on ranking? I have my own hunches but the data miner in me loves having some solid data first to back them up, something I’ve not yet had a chance to do!

Also is it something that may have an effect on the SiteLinks Google displays – the additional pages shown in some number one rankings?

Chris McGiffen

By: Dave Chaffey

Dave Chaffey — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 09:22:00 +0000

Yes, I agree on that too – particularly the 4 guidelines on Problogger. If you look at the way PageRank is calculated then they should reduce the PageRank, but that formula dates back to the mid 90s and there are obviously other factors, particular hub/authority concepts at play which outweigh this. On my blog I try to include at least one topical outbound link early in the post. I would restrict myself to fewer than 10.

That’s fine if you’re a blogger, but if you’re an enterprise site as many of my clients are, then that’s not practical – although they should review opportunities for external linking and not kill it through policies. But that takes us back to internal linking strategy many opportunities for internal topical linking near start of a document are missed because content owners don’t know SEO principles – this can’t be left to SEOs or maybe the CMS makes this difficult.

We should stop agreeing – its not cool!

By: RealitySEO

RealitySEO — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 11:41:00 +0000

Dave,

At Last indeed! Why is this never discussed? When it is, there is a bit of "Aw, C'mon" type of disagreeement from SEO's who have never given internal linking any thought. I'm glad you agree it is important. I'm curious how you feel about outbound links and their effect.

Mike

By: Dave Chaffey

Dave Chaffey — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 09:56:00 +0000

At last, another SEO who is amazed by lack of commentary and passion about internal linking strategies.

I have compiled a gallery of internal linking approaches including the ones you mention such as sitemaps (in this case shown for individual products).

SEO Best Practice Gallery

You have a great list there of internal linking approaches, but I would also include site footers, section-specific navigation and persistent search results (although Google tends to add those to the supplementals).

Dave Chaffey
SEO Best Practice Guide : DaveChaffey.com