Internal Linking Tactics #smx
Moderator: Detlev Johnson, CEO, SearchReturn
Speaker: Leslie Rohde, Founder, Windrose Software
- Why internal linking? you control your own pages, you control your own links, focuses the effects of external linking
- “Good ranking starts at home”
- Ranking is simple (On-page factors, link reputation, PageRank)
- Link Reputation (links speak louder than pages - Google bombing, aka “miserable failure”; click here, privacy policy, home, etc.)
- Fragmented reputation (”partial truth” - cooking link should be cooking appliances)
- Choose focus and force ranking/PR to “follow the money” (home page push, mid tier push, long tail push)
Speaker: Eric Enge, President, Stone Temple Consulting Corporation
- Syntax (nofollow - attribute/meta-tag, noindex, nofollow and noindex)
- Robots.txt (/test/, /cgi-bin/)
- noindex CAN pass PR
- nofollow meta-tag - will index but won’t pass link juice to ALL links on page
- nofollow attribute - won’t pass link juice to a specific link
- robots.txt - can’t crawl page, see links, or pass link juice
- For duplicate content: noindex pages, once removed: nofollow links to pages, DON’T use robots.txt page: lose ability to pass link juice)
- Content Syndication - syndicate tens of thousands of pages to a PR 8 site, noindex syndicated pages, prevents duplicate content problem, still passes link juice
- Ecommerce site – hard to get links for, solution: build a rich content tree (such as a BLOG), get links to that site, incorporate in the content tree: links to key parts of the site, nofollow all other links
- Basic Sculpting, remove: About us, Advertise with us, Contact us, Press center, List your biz on citysearch, Job opportunities, Partner sites (some)
- Duplicate content w/ http and https
Speaker: Adam Audette, President, AudetteMedia, Inc
- Text links are good - Beware of image links, have text links options, image replacement is an alternative
- Contextual links rule - images have no semantic meaning, images have emotion and context, text has semantic meaning
- Anchor text? - not golden key, be aware of context of pages, watch surrounding pages, influence increases w/ scale, on large sites: anchor text is influential
- Speak to Users - anchor text = calls to action, think about your site’s visitors
- Vary anchor text, keep it natural
- Standardize linking to all pages
- Link/page relations - Link text should match targets – again, telling the truth, keywords should surround the link and be in the link text
- Are your pages impt.? - Check internal link counts; pages w/out many internal links, give signal to bots and people = page isn’t important
- Link Thresholds - No more than 100-150 links/page BUT depends on case – Zappos has over 1500 on their brand page
- Related link structure - use related linking to flatten link structure, encourages crawling, breadcrumbs are good
- Tag pages - Have users tag pages/manually build; create popular pages, categorize, product, RSS Feeds
Speaker: Anton Konikoff, Founder/CEO, Acronym Media
- Keywords in navigation need to be ACCURATE
- Difficult to isolate net impact on rankings
- Potential success metrics: indexing levels, crawl frequency, crawl patterns, click-through rate on links
- BEFORE CHANGING links, link audit: click distribution, page abandon rates, user click paths, path to conversion
- Anchor text still has to be understood by users in order to have an optimal experience, SO balance SEO and user experience
- Business case for internal link changes: consult w/ user experience teams, sift through historical data, collect intel on competitors’ tactics, test suggestions
Q & A
- To pass juice, both Page A and Page B must be indexed
- Other search engines (not Google) follow nofollow tags
- How often is page indexed? – may show importance
- Nofollow affiliates – increase internal PR
- “Internal link currency” – spend wisely within site
NOTE: These notes are the major points of the presentations, and do not include every point the presenter made.
Tags: internal linking, Link Building, PageRank, SEO, SMX East