How to do a Powerful SEO Campaign to an Inner page without doing anything? Chris and I wanted to cover some important info on inner linking (that is, links between different pages on the same domain). Chris has done a video for you (below).
Inner linking is a really important and often overlooked area of SEO. Typically, we have generated backlinks to our site’s home page. Those backlinks give “link juice” power and authority to that home page. However, you can leverage that home page power multiple times over.
What I’m talking about is the equivalent of performing a powerful SEO campaign to your inner pages, without doing anything! What do I mean? All you have to do is this:
Use a link from your home page to your inner page and you will typically pass about 70% of
your home page authority and juice to that inner page. And all of this comes without diluting the power and authority on your home page. It’s like having your cake and eating it too (I seem to have been over-using that cliché recently!).
Bottom line is, this doesn’t have any negative impact, but is a huge positive impact on your inner pages. Check out our new teaching video to see what I mean – you’ll find it at the bottom of Module 11 but I’ve also put it here:
35 Comments
Tom Harper
August 4, 2017How do the menu links and sidebar links on a lower authority page or post affect the link juice? For instance, all (most) pages/posts have links back to the home page and other common pages via a menu (and also privacy policies and disclaimers in the footers etc.) does this dilute the link juice to go to the next page/post that I link to in the chain? And for that fact I have seen pages or posts that have a “previous page/post” link that links back up the chain as well as the “next page/post” link, does this cause problems if I use a previous page/post link?
Chris
August 25, 2017With inner linking, you don’t dilute link juice. You simply open taps. You basically lose about 25% of the link juice for every page step. So if you link like this: Home > Inner page 1 . Inner Page 2, then inner page 2 will receive 50% of the link juice that the home page is getting. If you have a deep page like this: home > Inner Page 1 > Inner Page 2 > Inner Page 3 > Inner Page 4. It will still get link juice, but only around 25% – 30%. You shouldn’t really go beyond 4 steps to count on link juice, and the above example is 4 steps, so that should be your maximum. If you need to go beyond this, you site is too complex
Les
October 27, 2016This is a bit of a follow on from Peter Cutforth’s question.
I am working on a large, established, non WordPress site and it is different from most sites in that it has a large number of “cosmetic pages” (for want of a better expression). The site sells sports ticket. In the sports league there are 22 teams but they only sell tickets for four of the teams as there is no demand for the remainder. Each team has a web page and all the pages are linked directly from the home page.
As a result Page Authority goes to 18 pages that do not need to be ranked but site visitors like to see the pages because it gives the site authority in the their eyes.
I am thinking of “no indexing” the “cosmetic pages” by using meta tags (or similar) “no index,follow”. The idea being to get link juice or Page Authority to the four pages where it is needed. A form of link or page rank sculpting. The “cosmetic pages” are definitely thin on content and not far off duplicate content.
After watching your video, this seems to be unnecessary. Do you agree?
Chris
November 1, 2016It sounds like the best move Les, to “No Index” those pages that are duplicate / thin pages. They aren’t going to help your site in any way. However, from a visitor navigation point of view, it is best to keep the links on the home page
marcello
October 26, 2016What do you think about the software of Todd Spears PSupremacy if the contextual links is the On Page Seo is the strong for the take great backlinks?
Chris
November 1, 2016Automating inner linking is OK Marcello, and better than no inner linking at all. However, manual inner linking is better, because you have full control of the structure you are building, but if manual is too complex for you, then tools like Todd’s plugin are a good alternative
kaushik Dutta
October 26, 2016Very informative article. How many inner linking you think could be natural from each page ? Does this work for blog posts having link from sidebar or nested linking from one blog post to another ?
John
October 26, 2016Hi Kaushik, yes it works for sidebar links. The number that is natural depends on your site/theme/purpose etc. Just think what actually IS natural? You know your site and it’s purpose, you can best decide what looks natural 🙂
ed
October 25, 2016I only have post snippets showing on my home page Chris. How do i work this for my site? I have category pages on a top navigation bar. Does that take care of it? Or what about a blogroll of recent posts on the sidebar?
thx
John
October 25, 2016Ed any links from your home page to the inner pages will work.
Dan
October 25, 2016Thanks for the great info! One thing I’ve found myself wondering: In your example, you have a home page linking to a state page, which then links to houston, houston links to dallas, dallas links to ft worth, ft worth to san antonio, etc.
Would it make sense and flow more power to my city pages if you have: home page to state page, state page to houston, state page to dallas, state page to Ft worth, etc? This way, would I not retain the PA12 (per your example) on each city page, as opposed to diluting it a little bit for each one?
John
October 25, 2016Dan that can work too – you just need to be careful with bigger sites not to appear too spammy with too many links on the home page, that is all. 🙂
Andy
October 25, 2016Thanks for the post Chris, i have the 2 following qs, appreciate your inputs.
1. If we have 2 PBN links from the same article, should we point both to the money site Home page, or 1 to the inner page then?
2. Previously some commented against footer site wide links, I guess they are quite alright as well?
John
October 25, 2016Andy 1) it depends what you are trying to rank. Link from a PBN to the page you want to rank. 2) they are fine if they are natural looking and not spammy (eg too many footer links would appear spammy).
Bill Dyer
October 24, 2016Thanks sharing that info. Since link juice flows to the inner pages, is there anything wrong with linking from an inner page article to the home page if there is relevant info on the home page?
Or do we want to make sure the link flow is one way…from top => down?
Thanks.
John
October 25, 2016You can do either Bill but the idea is to have power and authority flowing from the higher authority page, which is typically your home page. If you have an inner page which has higher trust and authority, then for sure link from that to your home page to boost the home page! In summary the idea is to link form higher authority to lower authority.
Carlos
October 21, 2016Thanks for the great info John and Chris… I have one question though. A client’s site has their main inner pages linked from the site-wide main navigation menu, will it still be beneficial to contextually link them from the home page?… or it is enough with the links on the navigation menu?
Thanks
Carlos
Chris
October 22, 2016It won’t hurt to contextually link but it is not necessary, but may help your visitors navigate around your site and give you a boost that way
Jessica Parla
October 21, 2016Hi John/Chris,
Thanks for the great article. I always have “Recent Posts” and “Popular Posts” on the sidebar of the homepage. Does that mean I should remove them from the homepage so the power and authority on your home page won’t be diluted?
Thanks
Jessica
Chris
October 22, 2016That’s the beauty of inner linking Jessica, you don’t lose power from the home page, so no need to remove them
Bogdan
October 21, 2016I undestand your strat, but I have one question. The PA can be added? For example, if I have a homepage with PA24 with 2 innerlinks. Those 2 pages will have PA17 each. If those two pages will have one innerlink each but both to the same page, what PA will have the new page?
Thanx
Chris
October 22, 2016For every level deeper you go, you lose about 30% of the power of the previous page so in your example, the follow on page from the PA17 would be PA12 approx
Jan Gerhards
October 21, 2016Very interesting. Thank you!
Pete Kici
October 21, 2016Thank you
Kreg Atterberry
October 21, 2016Thanks. I had just completed a spreadsheet of everything I wanted on page builds, I was working on it when I saw your email. My featured blog posts are covered with a home page link, but I was also making a crucial mistake of not linking my internal pages as well. It was real easy to add a column to the spreadsheet and add Link from Home.
John
October 22, 2016Perfect! 🙂
Peter Cutforth
October 20, 2016Great post and video guys!!
There used to be a teaching about “PR Sculpting”… which said you should nofollow links to inner pages you’re not trying to rank, like Policies, Privacy, Contact Us, etc., because it would “bleed” PR from the home page. What are your comments abut this?
If the home page has an authority of 10 units, do you believe the authority that gets passed down through internal links is less per link if there were say 15 internal links, compared to say, only 2? ie, there is only a fixed amount of authority to share between how ever many internal links there are… or is this a myth!?
Do you generally nofollow your internal links to privacy and other pages not targeted to rank?
Chris
October 22, 2016Thanks Peter. A lot of what we do has a degree of the theoretical to it. For most people, there won’t be a dilution of power from the home page say. However, if there is inner link spamming of your own site, then theoretically, you could lose power to those pages, but normally speaking, if your inner linking is natural, then there won’t be any loss of power to those pages
Rod Dyquiangco
October 20, 2016Brilliant! I thought I knew all the strategies behind inner linking until I watched this video. Now it’s time for me to go back and redo the whole setup for all my clients’ sites. This stuff is gold!
Ivan David Lippens
October 20, 2016Quality training right here!
Thanks John/Chris,
– Ivan
John
October 20, 2016Thanks Ivan!
Jim Eastman
October 20, 2016Is it a good, or bad idea to link to the inner page(s) using as anchor text the keyword for which you want that inner page to rank? Or to put it another way, does the Penguin penalty (over-optimization of anchor text) apply the same to inner page linking as it does to external links pointing to your money site?
Chris
October 22, 2016You can’t get in to trouble with exact match inner link anchor text Jim. Google is quite happy with it because it aids customer navigation, so don’t worry about that
Ganti
October 20, 2016Is this similar to Silo-Ing?
Chris
October 22, 2016Siloing is inner linking, and one of the examples I gave in the video is a silo Ganti
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