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I'm going to try to turn you around, because you're going down the wrong road. It's a bit of a read, but stick with me. Stop thinking about sculpting your internal links, and start thinking about how to create a user friendly navigation. Your SEO and conversions will flow from there. Let's pretend you're in the home services category and you install and replace floors. The services you provide are repair, installation, and replacement of tile, wood, and vinyl floors. You'll want to have a homepage that allows users to navigate to pages that describes the services you provide and the products you offer. So your top navigation could have a menu that looks something like this: Tile Floors -Tile Floor Repair -Tile Floor Installation -Tile Floor Replacement Wood Floors -Wood Floor Repair -Wood Floor Installation -Wood Floor Replacement Vinyl Floors -Vinyl Floor Repair -Vinyl Floor Installation -Vinyl Floor Replacement Now you've got at least ten pages that you can start to write content for, and each of them is easily accessible. If you have pages that you consider important to your users and your business objectives, best practice is to make them easily accessible from the homepage in your main navigation, and to make them accessible from related pages as well. In keeping with the home services theme, something you may consider a "non important page" could be your legal disclaimers. It's important alright, but not necessarily for the majority of your users. It's acceptable to link to content like that in the footer. The reason I'm trying to direct you to think about the way users interact with your site is because that's the way Google has designed their algorithm to work. Since users interact with the footer much less than body content, Google has tagged links in the footer, and those links pass less PageRank. If you spend your time trying to game the system, you'll ultimately lose, whereas if you focus on your users, you'll ultimately win. To go back to our main navigation example for our flooring company, if I followed your strategy I might place content in confusing places, moving my "tile floor repair" page to the footer or a sidebar where users can't find it and Google devalues. So focus on the users and the PageRank will follow. Good Luck!

The actual reason why we opted for this idea is the way our website and sub-domains built. We have nearly 10 sub-domains with thousands of pages. These are killing us not to rank better with several issues like broken links, internal redirects, link juice dilution, etc. We cannot really control all the pages in sub-domains as they all have thousands of visits. So, I am thinking the other ways to influence the website rankings with same sub-domains. Can you please tell me how this gonna work. As I told in my earlier post, I will make sure this optimisation will look natural to the possible and doesn't affect usability. Finally, I would like to know what's the impact of bad sub-domains on website if they are not well optimised?

Landing pages will be created for same long tail keywords. And these will not be more than 6. These are like our product features as well long tail keywords. So I think this is OK to Google. Anyhow these will be interlinked naturally in website. But I am not sure we can add to top navigation menu as it confuses more. Footer menu links will not be really noticed by users and only thing I am more into is how it helps in SEO? Do these repeating pages on footer menu influence our rankings for those long tail keywords?

Hi Marie, I have sent you private message here. Thanks for offering your help to look into our issue.

HI John, I replied to Patrick. "Why Google is not stopping them.....": What I mean was, Google claims that they will take care of any bad , low quality or spammy links pointing to us to make sure their they don't affect us. But it's not happening in our case as few links can impact rankings and they did. Is Google really accurate about this? Thanks, Satish

Hi, How long ago did you publish the page? What you refer is "on page" elements: h1, title and URL are one part of the job. Sure, if you got the exact keyword match, you got more chances to get to the top SERP. However, you're missing the second part of the job: links. You're page is new so you may not have any link. Here's a process you can use: Link the pages already well indexed you're referring to the new page. Use the MozBar to analyse the 2 first results, and check for the links of those pages. Do they have more than you? Scan those pages using https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/, and try to get their links. Scan also the top10 results on this keywords and go get some links Best.

Hi, Thanks for the reply. We are more interested in folders than different TLDs. In this case, how we gonna feed other pages of website to other language visitors? For french, they will land on example.com/fr/ and if they browse to other pages, should all other pages must have French? If so what's the way to present "French" content to them? Just an auto-translation? Or French written content? Any best example site you can refer?

Hi Marie, Thanks for such detailed answer. Actually I have recently disavow a website from which 74 links are pointing to our website. So that domain must be crawled post my disavow for the impact. Right? I wanna share our experience with related to back-links. Our global website has visitors around the globe. We been inversely ranking in India and US when we reclaimed and removed links from few domains. In more detail: We dropped in India and Improved our ranking in US when we reclaimed some back links and we dropped in US and improved in India while we removed those redirects. So it clearly mean that one or few links can trigger the algorithm that our ranking fluctuated for more than 15 positions. So such few or more suspicious back-links might be pushing us down. In this scenario, we can use Disavow undoubtedly if we know such links. We never received any manual action but not sure about manual penalty or silent penalty, but definitely we dropped post recent Penguin update where some of the back-links are real culprits. Hope I shared some useful information to you. Thanks, Satish

Actual scenario here is, we been looking the same statistics for almost an year. As I shown in above screenshot, only one link been listing when we click on the domain but number of "Total links" are in thousands. We have many domains link this. What we do to get updated with accurate linking ?

These posts are neither in main menu or footer menu. We show recently added posts beneath the most recent blog-post. Not related, but they will go in different categories like marketing, sales, all, etc.

Hi Rob, Thanks for the reply and helping hand. We are "crm" industry players. We are globally relevant. Product used globally and website has global visitors across different countries. We don't have any dedicated pages to any country. English language website. There are many internal redirects. And some sub-domains redirected as sub-folders. Reclaimed links sources are not from India/US. Mostly from Europe. Our domain is based in Germany. If you are Okay with private messages, I can send you more details. Please let me know what you need to know more. Thanks, Satish

Thanks for the response. Users are not actually spamming but using our pages as their platform. But the keywords are spammy keywords in internet world. Those pages are ranking good for certain keywords. So, I am confused whether to delete the spammy content pages or let it them being well-ranked pages.

Thanks for the reply. We been doing good till this drop and suddenly dropped for mobile category. The related changes we made in correlation to this drop are only few redirects and removing footer links. Btw, we are ranking good in mobile speed tests and mobile-friendly as per Google tools.

For internal links, just keep them relevant so people know what the link is before even clicking on it. If you have a guide on how to write page titles, make the internal anchor something like "guide to page titles". As for external backlinks, if they're editorial links that someone else is posting, it's usually best to just leave this up to the site owner since they're going to make it relevant anyway. The best way to have a natural looking anchor text profile is to make it natural! If you have to control the anchors (e..g directories or a guest post) then we typically lean toward this priority order: Your brand name Your URL Your primary keyword(s) That means that if you did web design and the name was "ProWeb", your anchor text profile would probably look something like this, in order of highest to lowest volume: ProWeb Pro Web http://www.proweb.com www.proweb.com Web Design Website Design webdeign You will get all kinds of variations like mis-spellings, "read more", "click here" etc as well but you get the picture. I hope that helps! Just make sure you don't have your keywords as the most common anchors - it's pretty obvious spam!

np, you don't want to assume things. this is what Matt Cutts said in 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MswMYk05tk It is still advisable that most websites out there rather rely on pages and subdirectories for regular pages and content than subdomains, but nowadays it is a highly subjective thing, basically suit yourself on it. But keep in mind the simple formula for decision making: Pros v Cons... which outweighs which and why. subdomains can certainly cause you, the owner and web dev, more work and impose a higher "moving parts" risk under most typical circumstances where /page is a viable alternative. also look at these https://moz.com/community/q/link-juice-from-subdomain https://moz.com/community/q/getting-mixed-signals-regarding-how-google-treats-subdomains

Hi Coleman, My question is not exactly the same but you have given right answer in different prospective. As you said we have many external links pointing to our non-existing pages of our website. So we been planning to redirect those to right pages rather than creating pager for such incoming links. Will this helps? We cannot create pages as we already replaced with new pages. My actual question is: We had referred to many external websites from our website or blog pages which are not actually direct links but redirecting and landing. Do we need to replace such links with actual landing pages? Will this helps us anyhow in SEO or completely negligible? For example: If we have mentioned example.com/seo and it's redirecting to example.com/sem. Do we need to replace /seo with /sem here? Thank, Satish

Hi Furtak, I will send you in PM. Thanks, Satish

Hi Dirk, You got it right. All the pages we redirected were pointing to similar pages once, so probably they should be okay as u said. Regarding disavow; what are the metrics to decide on a link? Some links might be good looking with decent DA and might be hurting us. What's the best way to findout actual back-links dropping us down. Disavow comes with risk as there are chances we may reject good links, so it's better to make sure about the links. Thanks, Satish

Thank you....Got it from screaming frog as u said

Hi Furtak, Thanks for the response. Keyword you mentioned must be in anchor text or URL? We have keyword in URL but not anchor text. And...how about linking this 2nd tier page internally from many number of possible links; so that it'll show-up in Google naturally? One of our most internally linked page is showing up in Google which we wanna replace with this new page Thanks, Satish