Internal Linking Strategies

[Sebastian]

My dear PAL friends,

I want to start a discussion regarding the optimal way to implement internal linking (Note: In this case, the homepage is the money page and all the internal pages link to it)

In my mind here are the different strategies from worst to best.

1. Having a tab in the navigation bar with the anchor text home
2. having a footer link with the anchor text homepage keyword
3. Having a tab in the navigation bar with the anchor text homepage keyword
4. having a link to the homepage from within posts using the anchor homepage keyword using the WP plugin that automatically creates links for certain keyword combinations.
5. Use 4) and "no follow" links to pages that shouldn't receive page rank like "About" and "contact us" which are linked to from the footer

Please revise this list or re-order these items based on your experiences. For one of my sites, I think I may have went overboard. Please review my strategy:

I am ranking for " kw1 - kw2- kw3 - kw4- kw5" and for combos of these in sets of 2s and 3s.

I use the WP plugin to link kw2 to the homepage when it finds it, I also use it to link kw1-kw2 to the homepage. I have a sidebar link on every page linking kw1 - kw2- kw3 - kw4- kw5 to the homepage. I have a footer link linking using kw1 - kw2- kw4- kw5 .

Is this extreme? So far the page is ranking well. Some internal pages have like 10 links to the homepage depending on recurrence of keywords.

Seb

[Josh]

You could do a "KW - Home" in one of your main nav's. I try not to link to the same page more than twice from within the same page, like a main nav link and a contextual..hoping G counts the contextual instead of the generic nav link. That gives you more anchor text to work with. Not that it hurts having multiple links or anything but it doesn't help I don't think.

I read your post wrong, i thought you were going to add all those links pointing to your homepage so disregard my post. I think #3 would be the best. No following the garbage page links is also a good idea.

[Sebastian]

I read your post wrong, i thought you were going to add all those links pointing to your homepage so disregard my post. I think #3 would be the best.

No that's correct, all the links point to my homepage. Thanks for the response by the way.

[Josh]

hehe np, i kept editing my post hoping no one was reading it. I wouldn't bother with so many links to the same page. only 1 is going to count and having a bunch of links to the homepage using different anchor text may annoy a reader imo.

[Sebastian]

only 1 is going to count

I think this needs to be confirmed. Recently I've stopped listening to common wisdom and started modeling my sites off ones that really work.

What better model than Wikipedia ? They pawn the serps. Looking at their linking strategies I notice they are linking only from within the articles. Every word links to a relevant page if it is in their directory and if the word comes up 35 times, there will be 35 links.

I mean maybe only the first one counts, I'm just not sure.

[Josh]

yeah thats true, if you are going to launch a site with no main navigation than it would be cool but for a typical poker portal that would be tough. I don't think they use varying anchor text for links to the same page though. If google counted every link I think everyone would have a boatload of links to their homepage using different anchor text with every one.

[Sebastian]

good point on the anchor text dude, thanks

[zzpot]

What better model than Wikipedia ? They pawn the serps. Looking at their linking strategies I notice they are linking only from within the articles.

my 2 cents are:

1/ google recognize a nav because it appears on all pages and beyond that it is ez for G to know it is a nav
--> the links in the nav are not treated like regular links, but nav links; and I guess these are weaker?

2/ Wikipedia yes has impressive internal link structure;

if you link a few times to the same page within a page, it counts once in this case I believe;

but they have a good density of links within text; I tried poker, 6 internal links in 1st page.

So there must be some kind of optimal density of internal links within text; maybe one link per 100 words or something like that; but they can afford such density because they have millions of pages; of course a site with 50 pages could not use such density.

remember that wikipedia is copyrighted by 1000s of different editors, so the text or internal links are not optimized; I believe though that this is the most natural density of internal links for an authority site, hence a good reference?

[Sebastian]

good post ZZ - very interesting concept

[MAC]

Have a question about internal links.
Is there any theory you know for URLs to be absolute or relative?

Is something I've been searching for since long ago.