Written on January 7th, 2005 at 12:01 pm by Darren Rowse
Do Internal links boost Search Engine Ranking?
Interesting thread over at ‘Self Starter’s Weekly Tips’ forums – Do Incoming links from the same URL have less weight than incomeing links from a different domain? was the question that started the thread off.
The advice is good – and can basically be summed up as follows:
Internal links within your blog are good for a number of reasons:
- Firstly they help your readers navigate around your site. A well thought out menu or relevant links within your posts to other post on a similar topic will help you retain your reader for longer and send them deeper within your site.
- They help Search Engine’s robots to navigate your site and hopefully to get every possible page indexed. If you have a site map page or an archives page that links to every page on your blog this helps the SE’s robots index you more comprehensively.
- It seems that most Search Engines (like Google for instance) do give some weight to internal links when it comes to ranking your pages.
However internal links are not the be all and end all when it comes to SEO
- I suspect that Google are decreasing the value/weight of internal links. There is a number of other people that I respect who believe that the last few updates to Google’s algorithm have had something to do with this – and that pages with a lot of internal links have actually seen their search engine page rankings (SERPS) decrease. I don’t think internal links are penalized – but rather have been given less value. Its just my opinion.
- External links are more important to SEO. If you want to build your blog’s ranking and SERPs then it would be a better use of your time to look for external incoming links from other relevant sites than to plaster your own blog with internal links.
9 Responses to “Do Internal links boost Search Engine Ranking?” - Add Yours
francesco
February 4th, 2005 5:23 am
It is possible to improve the Google pagerank changing the internal links of a website:
http://www.cepolina.com/freephoto/tips2.html
Chat To Us - Blogging Tips, Discussion And Comments about Blogging. » Internal Linking Boost Search Engine Rankings?
July 25th, 2006 8:14 am
[...] Once again Darren’s Problogger article gave this good tips about internal linking : [...]
Cyrus
September 10th, 2007 2:31 am
So basically what you’re saying is focus on obtaining external link to your blog rather than spend a tremendous time building internal links?
Darren Rowse
September 10th, 2007 8:04 am
Cyrus – I think it’s worth building up both. External links are more powerful – however internal links count too.
mcrilf
September 29th, 2007 1:53 am
I was reading somewhere that a useful tip on some internal links is to use a ‘rel=nofollow’ tag so that the page doesn’t leak page rank to an unimportant internal page. For example, use this to link to utility pages (Ts&Cs, contact us etc etc)
Robemmerson
February 28th, 2008 11:53 pm
Thanks for the interesting commentary. You make some good points, I guess it is important to concentrate on the quality of all links, internal and external.
Canvas Prints
May 27th, 2008 7:33 pm
Excellent – Thankyou
Simon
January 8th, 2009 6:19 am
I have about 200 internal links on every page of my blog.
Do you think it’s good or bad for my ranking?
Photo On Canvas
February 24th, 2009 2:33 am
Simon: It would be great if there were some quantifiable ratio of internal links to words per page or to external links. Maybe someone has some ideas on this?
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