SEO News and Information - The Topositionseo Blog

The Power of Internal Linking

An oft-overlooked aspect of SEO, Dan Thies, in an interview with Lee Odden of Search Engine Guide, expounds on the importance of internal linking techniques:

In SEO terms, the power of the web site is also largely ignored. Very few web sites that I look at leverage the power of their own internal links to improve rankings and broaden their search engine profile. I’ve got pages ranked for some very competitive search terms, purely from internal links. Not just for my site, but students as well, but you have to understand why it’s important and take action.

I agree. Link text and tight interlinking can do wonders for a website’s SEO campaign. Know how effective external links are? Well, the same thing applies to passing your internal link power around.

Google’s Weekend Update

Rand of SEOmoz is one of the few industry bloggers willing to share real SEO tips and information in his posts, rather than simply regurgitating the daily SEO gossip - which explains why many of his posts end up syndicated across many blogs, this one included. Needless to say, he’s got another bit of useful information up about Google’s apparent weekend update:

1. Global popularity/authority of a domain was slightly devalued when calculating rankings of deep, internal pages (and/or)
2. Deep links from external sites to deep content pages is now slightly more valuable

So it looks as if Google is reducing, at least somewhat, the benefit of having a very large, content-laden site as it pertains to any one particular page and its rankings on said site.

Links and SEO - A Timeframe

There’s a nice bit of information from Rand of SEOmoz about the lag between acquiring new links and those links helping out your SEO effort. According to him,

we found that it was not until 10 weeks after our efforts had begun that the rankings showed progress. Moreover, rather than being a steady climb, the site, which ranked primarily in positions 8-12 for most keywords, rose to #1 for nearly every term (almost like a mini sandbox-escape, though the site is quite old and has no other “box-like” features). This startling jump at Google is a new experience for me, as most of our projects have shown relatively steady climbs as the number and quality of links slowly increases.