Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure

July 10, 2007

I’ve been over at the SEOmoz site reading the recommended top search ranking factors. One factor was the “Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure” which “Refers to the number and importance of internal links pointing to the target page”.

What does this mean in plain English?
How do you make every other page point correctly to the target page? Will text navigation links be enough?

Text navigation links are great.

Basically the more pages in your site that point to a particular page, the more important it probably is. That’s the number part.

The greater the profile of the links in your site pointing to a particular page, the more important it probably is. A low profile link is a little tiny one buried deep on the page somewhere. A high profile link is at the top of the page, maybe one of the first ones, and may be in an < |h1|> or < |h2|> or other prestigious location.
A common way to structure links is called breadcrumbs. You’ve seen this, it looks like:

Home > Widgets > Blue > Round > Pricing

This will make the homepage the most important in the sites internal linking structure, ’cause it will get the most links (every page) and it always comes first. Near the top of the page.

Breadcrumb link structures work well imo as long as you can keep them short enough and avoid duplicate links to the same content(especially with different anchor tags).
All pages linking back to the main is good for users too.

Lets reverse engineer this a little though.

Content pages will be the only ones indexed in the long run, the link pages and directory pages seem to fall off fairly quickly now. Under that premise the links on the content pages (the end of the breadcrumb trail) are most important.

A link back to the main page and a link back to the directory level immediately above it seem to be most important. NOT placing a link back to other directories on the content pages might actually improve how relevant those links are.

Treating each directory as a separate entity, except from the main page, seems in order.

Yahoo and Google do this now too, actually if I asked you to find an article from Feb 15th, 2004 on Yahoo I bet you couldn’t from the main page, there is no directory. You’ll only find a link to that Feb 15th, 2004 article today on pages that have nearly the same subject… The serps still love the old pages despite their being hard to find.