Internal Linking to your home page

[Stocks]

I was wondering about internal linking to your home page does this help or should you use your internal links for other internal pages.

Also my site has a forum so I was wondering would putting a link in my sig back to the sites home page or an inner page be of any benifit.

Last question I just added a blog to the site which I'll try to have one post per day and was thinking of putting 1 link in each post to another page on the site. Good idea or bad idea

Thanks

[Newjabber]

Exellent post, im unsure on this too. But then again, figuring out google is like discovering the meaning of life!

[scrawnybob]

hi

I've seen several sites doing it - and quite liberally

the sites I have spotted doing it are run by people who know their SEO so either they're testing it because they figure it could work - or continuing to do because it does work

good internal linking including some back to homepage IMHO does work - but I think doing it sitewide and within duplicated structure probably doesnt that much

if its relevant I would do it

cheers scrawnybob

[Sebastian]

Internal linking is one of the cornerstones of good SEO. It lets Google know what your site is about. If all your internal pages link back to your homepage, Google will place emphasis on that page. If all these internal links use the same anchor text, Google will understand the theme of your homepage.

There are two ways to do this: "navigation links" and "in content linking". I personally "nofollow" the nav bar links to the homepage as as I view them more for human use and not robots. For the robots, I link back from deep withing my content to the homepage.

Hope this helps,

Sebastian

[Trikkur]

There are two ways to do this: "navigation links" and "in content linking". I personally "nofollow" the nav bar links to the homepage as as I view them more for human use and not robots. For the robots, I link back from deep withing my content to the homepage.

This is probably not a good choice. If you are doing this for an exact keyword match internal link, unless you use the table trick, it won't work.

If you have another reasoning behind it, feel free to keep doing it.

[Sebastian]

Hi Trikkur,

Not sure I understand the comment. I've been doing this with great results. Instead of having a set link with only one anchor in the navigation bar, I link from within the content of every post instead. This can be tedious but it allows to vary the anchor and get "in content" links.

Seb

EDIT: what do you mean by "the table trick" ?

[Josh]

I think it all boils down to which link Google counts. Is it the first, the best? You may or may not find an acceptable answer here:

http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/seo-blog/i...unt-in-google/

[nirva]

I noticed a huge improvement for my main keyword when I added a sitewide navbar link to the homepage with that keyword. I also scatter in-content links throughout the site mainly to other content rather than to the homepage.

[Michael Martinez]

Google will not count nofollowed links so Sebastien is not confusing the search engine with two links per page.

On the other hand, I don't recommend using nofollow on internal links. There is no real sense to doing that. You should be able to vary anchor text in your nav links as well as your main body copy links, if you want to do that.

[JohnH]

I have heard some "experts" claim that they have tested this with having two identical links on the same page with different anchors. They claim that the anchor from the first link is the one that counts.

Again this is just what I have read and heard that some people have tested, so try testing yourself.

I say link to some of your under-performing pages or new pages that you want indexed from the blog. Same goes for the sig. Use the nav to link to the homepage, that's where people expect it to be.