Backlinks are important in terms of SEO and ranking well in SERPs, but have you thought about the distribution of all that linkjuice on your site and how important it is to control that flow of link equity ?

Optimized linking between pages on your site helps retaining link equity within the site and also a fair and controlled distribution of the overall PageRank value to the most important pages.

Internal links can be seen as pipes in the core ground of your site, these should be placed strategically to distribute link equity and PageRank to the other pages within the site. Having pipes (links) pointing to pages of your site from external websites, will increase link equity (and help increase PageRank) on those particular pages. This goes both ways, links pointing away from your site to other sites will move link equity away from your site and might decrease the PageRank from those pages that contain outbound links.

Structuring Internal Links.
There are two main types of internal linking – hierarchical and mesh. Let’s have a look at hierarchical linking.

Hierarchical linking
Hierarchical linking is where some pages on your site are deemed more important than others.  Link equity is concentrated on the most important pages by internally linking to the most important pages but not cross-linking between the source of links.

In other words, link more often to important pagetypes (content, service, product) to funnel link equity and rank those important sites highest on Google for your most important keywords.

In most cases the root-level page has the highest PR value, as this is the page most often linked to – both externally and internally. This may not be ideal if your site is nothing but a splash page or contains little content. In this case a redesign would do wonders. Include more content and make it more relevant to Google (and your visitors). If this isn’t possible, you should re-link internally to your most important keyword-relevant content pages.

EXAMPLE

According to figure the ‘About us’ page is only linked to from a single page, the root-level page. The reason behind this is that the ‘About us’ page (in this example) is not nearly as important as the other pages, so instead of funneling PR value to it, we direct the flow of PR value out of the ‘About us’ page and back to the root-level page ‘eGuys’. Please note that the PR values in the figure 1 are fictional.

NOFOLLOW attribute
Here on eGuys we control the flow of link equity using the nofollow attribute on internal links to pages such as registration, login and privacy info. Pages which we don’t find very important. In other words, we tell Googlebot (or other major Search Engines) which links they should and shouldn’t put emphasis on.

In the future, I will cover Mesh linking, so look forward to it.

Back to online marketing.