Backlink focus?

[sportsman87]

Is it better to focus on getting as many backlinks to your homepage as possible or to create links to a variety of pages within your site? Is one better for over all domain authority?

Thanks!

[AlanBleiweiss]

Always think "is this natural looking?"  Meaning step out of your SEO perspective and think about a site owner who's never heard of SEO.

In a natural web, links exist that point to all sorts of pages, not all home page focused.  Why? Because if you've got a page two or three clicks deep with really great information that I want to share, I would link directly to it.  Because why would I want to force people I'm sharing it with to go to your home page and maybe or maybe not find it? Forcing through the home page is definitely NOT natural.

Based on that very specific notion, search engines reward a site with more value that has links pointing to a diversity of pages within the site than they do to a site with links ONLY pointing to the home page.

Of course SEO is extremely complex with hundreds of factors, so some sites MIGHT rank even if all links point to their home page.  But that's where you can actually get a competitive advantage, and leap-frog ahead of them if you follow the "what's natural" approach.  You can get higher rankings with less pages and less links going the "what's natural" way.

Do NOT, however, ignore all the other key SEO factors (link quality, high relevance of the page that has the link in it to the page it's linking to, and all the rest of the factors that need to be considered related to link building).