I’ve been talking to someone recently about internal linking, pagerank, RSS & xml sitemaps – and how they all hang together - and I thought I’d just share how I think about it – especially on sites with lesser domain authority.
Remember Google uses Pagerank, to determine “the importance of a page” so:
- Pinging Google blogsearch (still my favourite way of getting pages into Google results fast ) and XML sitemaps may help Google discover your pages and include them in search results, but they still aren’t the best way at all of helping Google determine which of your pages to KEEP or EMPHASISE or RANK or HELP OTHER PAGES TO RANK (ie the importance of a page), as time goes by.
While XML sitemaps goes some way to address this with the: attribute (The priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site. Valid values range from 0.0 to 1.0. This value does not affect how your pages are compared to pages on other sites—it only lets the search engines know which pages you deem most important for the crawlers – www.sitemaps.org) – I certainly wouldn’t ever just rely on xml like that….. the old ways work just as they always have – and often the old advice is still the best especially in SEO. - Keeping your pages in Google and getting them to rank is controlled by linking (Pagerank) – links from internal pages and from other sites to the page in question.
- Every page need to be linked to other pages for Pagerank (and other ranking benefits) to flow to other pages – that is the traditional, and I think accepted theory, on the question of link equity.
- Some sites can have short circuits – internal PR is prevented from filtering to other pages because Google cannot ‘see’ or ‘crawl’ that fancy menu system you’re using on deep pages. SEE here how Google sees your site.
- If you don’t have a lot of links, have poorly optimised (ORIGINAL) content found on other websites, and if you are starving a page of internal link equity – you will probably always have ranking problems for that page.
- The larger a site becomes, the more these problems become apparent, and you’ll probably need to start siloing content via categories & tags etc – how you interlink your pages on your site my be the first indication which pages are useful to Googlebot.
- You can’t emphasise everything, so ensure you emphasise the pages that are of most importance to you, by linking to them a lot, especially from relevant pages on your site.
In short, rely on the ‘newer’ protocols for discovery purposes, and the old tried and trusted way of building a site to get it ranking properly over time. Let me know how you think about or visualise internal “link equity”.
Related Posts On Internal Linking
Seeing as I am doing internal linking this week, I’ll start off by giving my curent pages on internals some link love…
1. Internal Linking – Optimize Website Navigation & Site Structure
“I like to structure my site so I don’t need to “nofollow†a lot of internal links to target heat – but I have no problem using this method. …”
2. Matt Cutts Kills Internal Pagerank Sculpting With Nofollow?
“I’d long fell out of love with PR sculpting internal pages using nofollow as the results were not worth it for me on the sites I worked on …”
3. Internal Links – Only The First Link Counts in Google?
“OK – From this test, and the results on this site anyways, testing links internal to this site, it seems Google only counted the first link …”
4. Internal Linking – Link To Important Pages In Your Site – Often
“Hmmmm… while you can certainly overdo it in terms of spammy internal linking or spammy on-page seo, I don’t think you can ‘overheat’ a page on your site if …”
5. What Is Nofollow? Should I Use It On Internal Links?
“After reading all those links in your other internal link scupting post, I decided to take one of my 10 page sites and start it from scratch …”
6. Link Internal To Relevant Pages, Often, Stupid!
“I’ll lay down my thoughts on internal link optimisation later in this seo tutorial, but onpage, I link internal to relevant pages in my site …”
7. Does Only The First Link Count In Google?
“For example (and I am talking internal here – if you took a page and I placed two links on it, both going to the same page? …”
8. Get Top Ten Rankings In Google With Simple SEO
“Make a relevant, well optimised page that is well linked to in your internal site structure, and back it up with a few anchor text rich …”
9. Is It Diversity Of Keywords In Link Profile That’s King?
“Though in a page title, it may rank, throw in an internal link or … You can do a lot of this via internal links on a strong domain. …”
10. Sculpt PR – Google Pagerank Sculpting
“Should you nofollow unimportant internal pages or nofollow external links in an effort to consolidate the Pagerank you have already accrued? …”
13. Do I Need A XML Sitemap For My Website?
“The first one is a a page where it contains links to your internal pages and the second which is in the format of xml is meant to guide the …”
14. How Many Links In A Dropdown Navigation System?
“If you can’t be bothered tell Google what your most important pages are on your site via your own internal navigation structure, …”
15. Simple SEO Plan Of Action?
“not one mention of their keywords in their internal link profile – or the secondary link profile, as I think of it. …”
16. Are Self Pings Nuking Your WordPress Blog’s Pagerank?
“By now everybody knows internal linking is very important – it gives you a chance to add keywords into your link profile and lets users …”
17. SEO – What Not To Do In Search Engine Optimisation
“page.htm†and “sub.domain.com/page.htmâ€) access the same content; mixing www. and non-www. versions of URLs in your internal linking …”
18. Links That Effect Ranking Change In Google SERPS
“Your internal links! Get your site in order before you get links. Google loves a good site structure with plenty of text links pointing to …”
19. Limit Anchor Text Links To 55 Characters In Length?
“What’s best practice when creating links – internal, or external? What is the optimal length of a HTML link? …”
Nice one Shaun. I don’t think sitemaps are that much of a necessity unless you have a huge site. I believe internal linkage is still the most important factor. Btw SeoMoz reports that pr sculpting with nofollow has decreased in past few months and people are starting to use rel=canonical more often :)
@Tasarım, Bearing in mind most people have problems turning their computers on without a manual, its not suprising that there is a FOTM (flavour of the month) approach to SEO. The last two months have had a lot of articles posted regarding rel=canonical, hence lots of people using it. To my mind rel=cononical is a fix to a problem where nofollow stops the problem happening in the first place. For example, a LOT of people have no way of completing a proper 301 redirect due to their hosting package, so are forced to clutch at straws with the rel=canonical meta on old webpages they would rather delete. if the sites was properly linked with nofollows etc sticking to the overall plan, then rel=canonical would not be needed at all. I find site maps help getting sites into the index faster than waiting for the spider to find it on its own. But then again, im talking about the scrub PR 1/2 ranges. The spiders dont come to play with us that much anyway :)
Excellent point about flavour of the month SEO – gives me an idea for a post :)
i don’t use rel=canonical at all
[...] Internal Linking Versus RSS & XML Sitemaps, Hobo [...]
The value of an internal link is often overlooked by people and it is the easiest link to get. I use a plugin called Smart Links to assist with my Internal and External Linking and it does much of the job automatically. Then, I do a manual review to see if the pages that I want to be seen are being seen and, if not, I take steps to manually remedy that.