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Internal Link Structure
Old 11-28-2004, 08:30 PM Internal Link Structure
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I have been reading a bit about internal link structure. Its pretty complex stuff, and I am not entirely sure I understand it.

My site is http://www.neorunner.com/ and I would like to make sure the link structure is proper for SEO and visitors.

It was a breeze getting my site to PR 4, but after that, nothing I do seems to help.

Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

*I realize this could go in the "site review" section, but there is a 3 site review minimum. I have found nothing that I could contribue. Until I find something to contribute, I will make due asking questions elsewhere. I just wanted everyone to know that I have made the effort to read through that section.
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Old 11-29-2004, 09:25 AM
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The internal link structure and directory structure of your pages is very important. There is only so much stuff that you can fit on the home page. Especially if you cover a range of topics. You may find that a deep page in your site is more keyword rich than you front page and so would rank highly if only it had some PR down there.

Such quality pages rank badly cause most people dump all their link popularity onto the home page. The only links to the deep pages are via the internal links of the site. So all the deep pages have just one good referrer (the home page). You can get google to go deeper into your site by getting some other sites to link to some of your deep page. This creates more PR hot spots on your site. You can then play with the link relationships between these hot spots and you other pages. Doing so can bring some pages to the fore front while others hang behind.

If you simply want to make every page equally popular, then you should use the simple "every page links to every page" method. This is easy with a small site cause you can fit all the links into a nice tidy menu. Another method that has the same effect is to have the home page link to every page and then every page links back to the home page. Assuming your directory structure is the same depth for each page then each page will get an equal share of the PR.

But sometimes you don't want every page to get the same PR. You may want to downgrade some pages such as you "contact us" page. Would just be a waste of PR to have a high ranking page for your email address. Another (rather cruel) use would be to lower the PR your links page for link exchanges. So that you don't leek PR to them too much.

To do this you just reduce the number of links to the page to be downgraded. So if you have every page linking to each other but the "contact us" link only appears on the deep pages, not on the home page. This reduction in the number of links to the downgraded page will result in less PR going to that page plus since the page is not linked to off a high PR page like the home page but rather off other deep pages, it get's an even smaller PR yet again.

Another way to adjust the flow of PR is the position of the links within a page. Links at the top of the page's html will get more PR through them than links at the bottom of the html. In a tabled layout, the left column is usually at the top of the html while the right column is a the bottom. So links put on a left hand menu will get more importance than links placed on a right hand menu. So links to important pages go to the left and unimportant links go to the right.

You can also use markup to show importance and unimportance of some links to others. Putting a link inside <em>, <b> <i> or <h1> tags will mark it out as more important than normal. In the reverse, wrapping a link inside <font size="1"> tags will make them less relevant to the SE spider. (Yeh I know font tags are bad, but spiders don't read css yet and sometimes bad can be good.)

There is a obvious problem here though. If you reduce the number of links to a page, how are your users supposed to find it? Well good question. One solution would be to use another form of link such as javascript or even flash. This would allow users to follow the link but would be invisible to the search engine spiders. But do remember that these have usability and accessibility issue of there own. Many people browse with javascript turned off, not just spiders.

I'm sure by now you will have got that the more links you put between pages, the more PR is spread about. The less links you use, the less PR you spread. This allows you to concentrate PR onto the more important sections of your site. It also allows you to reduce the PR of less important sections.

Things get more complex for large sites. It becomes impossible to have every page linked to from the home page. The menu would be huge. Many people use dhtml menus for this size of site but such menus use javascript which search engines can navigate. So an alternative link structure has to be created for the search engines. This is where you can get creative. Since you have a large number of pages and so a large number of links to play with. A good place to start is to draw a site map of your pages and link structure on a big sheet of paper. You can then try to guess how the PR flows form one section to another. Decide which sections will need PR and which wont. Also which sections will get PR form external deep links and which will not. They try it out. You can always change things again later on.
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Old 12-05-2004, 12:41 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rincewind
This would allow users to follow the link but would be invisible to the search engine spiders.
That's known as cloaking and will get you banned from Google if they catch you.

Other than that, rincewind, that was an awesome post. Very useful information! I curently utilize my link structure to drain a bit away from my Terms of Service page, but other than that I have it evenly spaced out.
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Old 12-05-2004, 04:32 PM
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Build a comprehensive site map with every link to every page on your site. Then put a link to this on every page of your site. This worked wonders for me.

You can build one here for free:
http://www.searchbliss.com/site-map-generator.htm
Be sure to follow the directions carefully.
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Old 12-05-2004, 05:05 PM
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Nice tool, Kline. Does that sitemap use JavaScript, and if so, how do search engines read it?
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Old 12-06-2004, 12:10 PM
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Thanks for the kind words.

The links are actually layed out in an unordered list with images. The javascript is only used to show and hide sections of the unordered list when folders are opened and closed (collapsible). The search engines only see it as layed out links (completely open). In other words, the source code of links is completely visible to the search robots, and are indexed.

A side note, there is a cookie used so when your visitors return to the site map, it is layed out the same way they left it. This way they can view it exactly where they left off.
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Old 12-06-2004, 01:17 PM
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Hi neorunner, I didnt read the above posts but wrt your navigation- i am confused.
how do you get back to home page? took me a stoned moment to realise that your PPC search engine link Leads to yr home page.

SEO is based on having a friendly web design. So is your question about internal structure. Its no use having SEOed the website just to have visitors shutting the window within seconds
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Old 10-15-2007, 05:49 PM Re: Internal Link Structure
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I am new to SEO and I am in the part where I am optimizing the internal link structure. I just want to ask if this thread is still applicable
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Old 10-15-2007, 07:34 PM Re: Internal Link Structure
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I found this conversation most interesting, I had to find out what cloaking was. Let me share with you what I found.
"Cloaking refers to the practice of delivering different content to a search engine thanto human visitors browsing a web site. In practice, cloaking is implemented through IP delivery. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaking for more details"
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Old 10-15-2007, 07:42 PM Re: Internal Link Structure
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Quote:
I just want to ask if this thread is still applicable
Pretty much
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Old 10-15-2007, 08:37 PM Re: Internal Link Structure
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I think the specific type of cloaking is ok here, in fact it's being asked for by Google.
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