Many webmasters ask How do I make pagerank juice flow efficiently in my website or How to link to external websites without losing out on pagerank? Since over the last 2 days we have posted about the benefits of linking pages internally for new visitors and repeat visitors, today we’ll take a look at internal links from a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) perspective.
Before we begin, it’s important to understand what pagerank is and how it’s linked to website optimization. We’ll be posting about these topics soon, so subscribe to our RSS feed for updates.
- Identify the pages. Good internal linking can help visitors get to more pages on your website, and help you get more links for all the pages linked to them. You should make sure, that the pages you want to send the maximum pagerank to, add great value to your site. These would typically be the best written articles, the best selling products page, the breaking news, the best page that converts visitors to subscribers or anything else that you want, take your pick. Link to these pages from the best ranking pages of your site, if not all.
- Place them well. As a general rule of thumb, your site’s navigation should allow you to selectively place link to these pages in high visibility area of your website. If you have a forum that allows site-wide announcements, you might want to place the links there. Since all your pages have some kind of pagerank, even the ones that show zero in Google toolbar, you are causing a little PR to flow from each to this one page, which will quickly become one of the highest ranking pages on your site. In some cases, it may be ranked higher than your homepage !
- Adapt to the flow. Since Google has changed it’s policy on how the nofollow attribute affects PR flow in and out of your site, it’s important to think about the internal and external links on your high PR pages again. Pay extra attention to how the chosen pages are linked to from within your site.
- Give and you shall receive. It’s also extremely important to look at how pagerank flows outside your site. Google considers it a good practice to link to the ‘good neighborhoods’ on the web, but leaves it up to you to determine if pagerank should flow when you link to them. Considering the current policy, we advise to allow pagerank to flow to pages you want to link to, or got information from. Since it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get good incoming links, helping others might help you in the long run. Even if you do not get any links from the people you link to, Google will atleast recognize your site as a ‘good neighbourhood’ site.
- Hide the unknown. Any other links that appear on your site, that you did not place knowingly, for example, from comments on your blog or signature messages in forums, should be hidden from search engines. Hiding such links from search engines can have a tremendous impact on how pagerank flows internally on you site. You might want to find solutions for your site software which do this. vbSEO, software for search engine optimizing vBulletin forums, comes with such an option. You might look for plugins for wordpress that do the same.
- Size it up. Another thing that can help a lot, is the size of the links. By size, we mean the font size of the text link and the image size of the image link. Google weighs link value by it’s font size, but making the link bold also helps. Google also weighs big images higher. Small image links are usually thought of as site navigation elements, which is not far from the truth.
Again, optimizing your website’s internal linking takes a lot of effort to begin with, but pays off well if you make it a habit. Correct internal linking is one of the most important tools for improving visitor experience and building great SEO.
You have been reading our Complete guide to internal page links
Also read :
Internal linking for first time visitors
Internal linking for regular visitors
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Regarding juice flow, it pays to ientify your bucket pages and/or create bucket pages with little outward linkage, these bucket pages will rank highly for their target terms and is something i always suggest as opposed to opening up high pr pages to spread juice throughout a site.
I can see the logic behind the concept, but what to you suggest to do to get the bucket pages to accumulate pagerank?
What content should they contain and how should they be linked from internal links and receive links externally?
Hope this will help readers understand more about the topic …
keyword research will identify the bucket pages, then use only the target term to lonk to these pages and restrict the outbound links from these pages (even internally) so they seep to fewer sources. the key is control of anchor text in and out – deffinately dont link out using the page focused anchor!
oh and i forgot any pages linked out should be children of the parent topic when possible!