More or less internal links on home page?

[Guest]

This post is deleted!

[AlanMosley]

From a purely PageRank perspective. To get your homepage to rank the best, you need to link to every page from your home page, and link back to the home page from every page., but do not cross link between sub pages.

Now that will amass the most PageRank on your homepage, but will not be very good for users, but that is the best starting point read http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank for good explanation

use this calculator to test what I suggest http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank_calculator.php

[anthonydnelson]

I think your logic is right on.

It sounds like you have your site set-up correctly to try and promote your top 30-50 pages. Your competitors appear to be linking to 150+ pages, hoping to capture the long-tail more effectively. If despite of this set-up, you are still being outranked by your competitors on your main pages (keywords), the result comes down to two basic principles.

1. On-Site Optimization & Content
2. Off-Site SEO (links)

SEO is all about continual optimization. Look for places you can improve over the competition (content, page load time, ux, brand, design, etc) and you'll get there over time.

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

Having a lot of internal links pointing out from one page has traditionally been thought of us sub-optimal - not because a page will "leak" PageRank if it links out a lot, but because it is thought to have a certain amount of authority to pass on, and linking to 30 pages ensures that the authority is spread between 30, as opposed to 200, other pages. Matt Cutts spoke about this in an interview once, but it was a very long time ago - http://moz.com/blog/questions-answers-with-googles-spam-guru

Whether this is still the case is questionable, but it is generally not advised to link out at a high rate from a home page. I would say that your decision here should still be made on usability and that it is likely other factors contributing to the other sites' rankings - although if you have pages you're keen to push, a home page link can make a good difference.