Internal linking

[seoanalytics]

Hi,

I currently have built my website with internal links to boost my category pages (the ones that are the most important with the most traffic). Is the way to go or nowadays or doesn't it matter what pages you boost. I beleive  what I did is some sort of "page rank sculpting" but is it still useful ? or I should I link natural across my website even though some pages will get a boost and some won't ?

The link that I have are at the bottom of my content (not in the footer) but at the bottom of the page next to each other ? does they count or is it really bad to have them that way ?

I have a blog and I was wondering if when I link from my blog page for example about "Barolo" to my page about "Piedmont" if I should also link from my page about "Piedmont" to my Barolo page or if the link only has to go one way from my blog / Barolo page to my piedmont page to boost Piedmont.

Thank you,

[Igor.Go]

All other things being equal if you link from Barolo to Piedmont it will give a very little boost to Piedmont article. But that's almost never the case, one external backlink can make all the difference here.

In general, it does make sense to keep your internal links distribution in check. Usually, you want to link more to upper-level pages (categories), if you have breadcrumbs on your website, that should take care of it.

You can calculate Internal PageRank for all your pages and see if there are pages or categories which have too little or too many internal links compared to the rest of the pages on your website or pages in the same category.

[seoanalytics]

Thank you for your reply Igor,

From what I understand you are saying that it isn't worth my time creating blog pages to link internally to the pages that I want to boost. It seems that an external link is better or that breadcrumbs will do the job, correct ?

How about one pages that are hard to rank on because of high demand won't maybe 10 or 15 internal link via my blog help ?

Or is is better to have a few very good contextual links across my site ?

[Paddy_Moogan]

Hi there,

Thanks for your question.

You are right in trying to make sure that your most important pages are linked to internally as much as possible. It's a signal to Google that the page is important plus your internal PageRank will be able to flow to key pages and give them a chance to rank. This kind of technique has been described as PageRank sculpting in the past, but it's not too helpful to think of it like that because none of us know what the PageRank of a given page is. Instead, look at what pages a user would want to find easily and the ones that are important to your business, then make these prominent in your navigation.

Cross-linking from blog posts or other pages of content can also be beneficial, but isn't particularly scalable. So by all means do it where it makes sense, but I wouldn't rely on this as the sole way to link internally to important pages.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

[seoanalytics]

That is what I did so I guess I am good. Now, I just need to create nice blog pages that satisfy the user  and link to the correct pages so that the content between the 2 pages I link benefits the pages.

Thank you,