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.