what do you all think of internal linking (so links within your site)?
Does it contribute to good SEO?

I always thought they also contributed to page values, but I just heard that they don't really....

I don't know what you mean by 'page values' but internal links are definitely important and contributing.

The simple things:
- A too deep link structure would bury some pages so that they almost never get crawled. Or if you're a bit lucky it will just take a long time before the crawlers come by! How deep is too deep? Well, depends on your websites popularity in generel...
- Using all the WRONG keywords as anchor text will tell search engines that the page is about everything else than what you want it to rank for.

Advanced things include:
- Related internal pages linking to each other.
- Ensuring you get crawled more often by linking from the right internal pages.
- Getting rankings for typos etc.
- And much more...

i mean the PageRank of a page. I was told so by someone from Google, that's why I was wondering

Internal links does matter in regards to pagerank. But for you pages to pass on enough pagerank for it to be visible then you'd need some pagerank on at least one of your internal pages.

HTML sitemap + Google sitemap are required.

The form backlinks to home page and interior pages, alternating periodically.

I would say that sitemaps are definitely not required. With a decent link structure your sitemap will be providing almost no value to your site compared to all other internal links!

Sitemaps are only for those who makes pages that they don't know how to (or want to) link from their other pages.

Ignore Google sitemaps at your own peril.

Internal links are great for the obvious reason - the visitors!!! If you give links to other related parts of your site, they are more likely to stay on your site and read more, which means you get more chances to show them adverts or whatever, which means more chances of getting some income. In my personal experience its pretty irritating for a website to say "Have a look at our page about rabbits" (for example), without making that a link - i.e. expecting you to find it on your own...no thanks - off I go to the next site! All of this will indirectly affecting ranking through getting the information "out there", building your rank via the Alexa toolbar etc etc

Sometimes I wonder if people forget that websites are there for real people to read, and not just search engines

Originally Posted by mattd

Internal links are great for the obvious reason - the visitors!!! If you give links to other related parts of your site, they are more likely to stay on your site and read more, which means you get more chances to show them adverts or whatever, which means more chances of getting some income. In my personal experience its pretty irritating for a website to say "Have a look at our page about rabbits" (for example), without making that a link - i.e. expecting you to find it on your own...no thanks - off I go to the next site! All of this will indirectly affecting ranking through getting the information "out there", building your rank via the Alexa toolbar etc etc

Sometimes I wonder if people forget that websites are there for real people to read, and not just search engines

yeah wel sure.. of course you are right, but the question still remains. You can argue about techniques that are non crawlable. If internal linking doesn´t matter you can just don´t care about crawlable or noncrawlable....

Originally Posted by pcdoc

Ignore Google sitemaps at your own peril.

I've never seen Google sitemaps do any good for sites with decent internal linking. The only thing I've seen them help for is getting duplicate content out of supplemental and into the real index - but this is only in combination with some other stuff.

It has never been a problem to get a website fully indexed by Google as long as there are no things that directly makes it uncrawlable... So why should we suddenly begin using sitemaps?

Google knows very well, that they can't depend on webmasters making sitemaps. They also know very well that if they provide any services like sitemaps and favors sites using such, then it will be the search engine spammers having the biggest advantage and they'll be the first to abuse it. All the large and well respected sites - as well as all the small non-money makers - will take months to several years before they even get to the point where they'd consider implementing such sitemaps. And who will suffer from this? Users, because of less quality SERPs and thereby Google.

Sure, if your site already sucks in the SERPs and you hardly ever see google as referrer, well then I'd suggest you try it! But first ask some pro's because there is probably a simple logical reason that you don't get traffic!

Google knows very well, that they can't depend on webmasters making sitemaps. They also know very well that if they provide any services like sitemaps and favors sites using such, then it will be the search engine spammers having the biggest advantage and they'll be the first to abuse it.

You are making statements like you work for Google.

Tell us more, tell us more.

Originally Posted by pcdoc

You are making statements like you work for Google.

That's irony, right?

My statements are all based on public statements from Google employees and the history of search engines.

Yes, stefanjuhl, that was intended as "tongue in cheek", not a stab at you personally.

My point is that none of us really knows the inner workings of G's algorithms.

All we can do is react.

Sure, we wouldn't know exactly how it is. But when ones has enough data to compare from enough different sites, then it doesn't take long to figure out, at high accuracy, what has become different.

And another but... My last statement wasn't from an algo-perspective but from a business-perspective - the danger of losing users due the bad SERPs because they are giving "tools" that spammers will be the first to implement.

http://news.com.com/Google+exec+chal...3-6095705.html
If you don't want to read the entire article, then just read Peter Norvigs answer to the question "What I get a lot is: 'Why are you against the Semantic Web?'"

That's pretty close to some of what I said about Google, right?

Interesting article, your point being?

This comment from Peter Norvig:
"We deal with millions of Web masters who can't configure a server, can't write HTML. It's hard for them to go to the next step. The second problem is competition. Some commercial providers say, 'I'm the leader. Why should I standardize?' The third problem is one of deception. We deal every day with people who try to rank higher in the results and..."

Applies directly to my previous comment:
"Google knows very well, that they can't depend on webmasters making sitemaps. They also know very well that if they provide any services like sitemaps and favors sites using such, then it will be the search engine spammers having the biggest advantage and they'll be the first to abuse it. All the large and well respected sites - as well as all the small non-money makers - will take months to several years before they even get to the point where they'd consider implementing such sitemaps."

If you can't see and understand what I mean, then I'm sorry that I might lack skills to explain it better.

is a google site map required? no... but from personal expereince i can say that it speeds up the process of getting indexed.

i currently have over 1,500,000 SERP's in google for one of my sites. and i send them a sitemap every day at 4am
:P

Originally Posted by pcdoc

Ignore Google sitemaps at your own peril.

Removing a google sitemap from one of my sites did wonders for pulling several hundred pages out of the supplemental index.

Implementing google sitemaps and removing it again after a couple of weeks have helped me get a site - with obvious duplicate content - out of supplemental...

The more often your page is linked, whether internal or external--any page-- the better the chance the search engine bots will find it and follow the links on that page to other pages.

The advice I see most often is to create a linking structure where no page on your site is more than three clicks away from your home page.

On my home pages I link to all my section indexes and my sitemap. On section pages I link to the categories in that section. On category pages I link to the articles in that category. On each article page I link to at least 5 related articles either on that site or one of my other sites.

I also try to put my link exchanges on a related article instead of buried in a Web Links section no one ever reads and try to get the people who link to me to do the same. Eventually almost every page on my sites will have decent page rank, even if I don't have many outside links coming into them.