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Internal Linking Strategies: SEO in 2008

If you’ve been slaving away at maximizing Google page-rank for your blog or non-blog type sites, chances are that you’ve been ignoring today’s hottest SEO technique. If your site is at least a few months old, you will have noticed some major changes in its ranking and in the way its SERP (search engine result pages) are displayed. Google has made at least one big, big, big change to the way it ranks pages. What is it?

Internal Linking Now Counts More Toward Page-Rank Than Ever

All of us WEB GURUS or WEB MARKETEERS used to pretty much ignore internal page linking. We thought the only thing that mattered, essentially, was how many high quality back-links we got from external web-sites. We concentrated on getting links from sites with similar content as ours, and sites whose own pagerank was very high, or at least higher than ours.

We worked at getting the right keywords inside these links, and surrounding them with a paragraph of related content. We made sure they were non-reciprocated, that they didn’t grow in number too quickly, that they were in a ‘good neighborhood’ of related sites and IP addresses, and so on. This took lots of work.

Sophisticated automatic three tiered and four-tiered link networks were built to help us do all of this. Sometimes this worked and our sites moved to the top positions in search results for our targeted keyword phrases. Until the page-rank of last October (2007). After that new algorithm took effect, the world of web marketing changed dramatically.

Millions of pages and whole sites that used to be highly ranked suddenly were de-ranked or completely disappeared from Google Index. Traffic plummeted. Income from Adsense bottomed-out and we all panicked. What happened?

Internal Ranking Became a Prime Factor in Page-Rank

Internal linking is the way you build pointers to each page of your site. Google now uses internal links as a major factor in the determination of the overall importance of any particular page. If a page in your site is linked only from the site-map, or perhaps from only one other link somewhere else on your site, chances are that Google will now place this page into its supplemental index.

What is the supplemental index? Well this is an index that the biggest search engine in the world keeps of pages that have been reviewed, but have been found to be either duplicated or not very important. And, when a page is in this index, it will be served out in search results only if there is nothing else in the main index.

Being in the supplemental index is something you definitely want to avoid. Why bother to add a page to your site if it will only be served out in search results at the very bottom of the result pages?

Automatic Page Building

If you’re building lots of pages with some kind of scraper program, news aggregator script or plug-in, chances are that nowadays these auto-generated content pages, whether virtual dynamically generated and served, will end up in Google’s supplemental index.

These days, building a site with a million auto-generated pages is a complete waste of time… from two points of view:

1. Chances are these pages are made from either 100% duplicated content or almost anyway.

2. There are probably few if any internal links to each of these pages

And, that’s enough to get the pages sent directly into the supplemental index. So, why waste your time building these automatic scripts and wearing out your server with useless bot traffic?

What Actually Works to Get More Traffic

Write genuine, fresh pages manually. Be sure that you do NOT duplicate someone else’s content. Be sure to build many links to each page, even if you have to have rediculously LONG menus in your navigation. A good rule is to build at least 5 internal links to point to each and every page you write.

One way to do this is simply to have a series of departmental or section site-maps that list the titles of your pages, section by section, or department by department. One page for each section, division, department and so on. Make sure there are several of these pages that point down into each of your individual content pages. That should do it.

Time you spend doing this will work for you. Time you spend installing and managing auto-generation scripts is wasted.

Contributor's Note

One of the main benefits to blogging software is that it creates lots of internal linking automatically. If you are using a site you created in raw HTML or even wit Dream Weaver and similar software, you should make double-sure you have created several links inside your site to each of its pages. Or, simply use WordPress... that's easier for most of us.

PLEASE VISIT THE CONTRIBUTOR'S WEBSITE

IdeaPro.com Online Marketing
Builds highest search engine rankings.
www.ideapro.com

And if you're creating a traditional site rather than a blog, once you've expanded your menu you need to think about usability so that your visitors find it easy to navigate. Break the links down into blocks of half-a-dozen or less, with a header for each block.

Good policy, to make the navigation usable. However, the most valuable internal links are those buried inside the pages themselves. Same rules as those governing the value of an external backlink apply to internal links:

1) on a page titled with the keyword
2) in a paragraph high on the page with topical sentence relating to the keyword
3) linked terms using the keyword
4) overall page content relating to similar subject matter

In other words, link some of the related pages to other pages in your site, as you write each page. Try to accumulate 5 or 6 links pointing to each page this way.

Navigation sidebar or top-tabbed links are not enough.

Thank you for explaining this. We all need to know in simple info how the ranking works.

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