How much link juice does a sites homepage pass to inner pages and influence inner page rankings?

[sanj5050]

Hi,

I have a question regarding the power of internal links and how much link juice they pass, and how they influence search engine ranking positions.

If we take the example of an ecommerce store that sells kites.

Scenario 1

It can be assumed that it is easier for the kite ecommerce store to earn links to its homepage from writing great content on its blog, as any blogger that will link to the content will likely use the site name, and homepage as anchor text.

So if we follow this through, then it can be assumed that there will eventually be a large number of high quality backlinks pointing to the sites homepage from various high authority blogs that love the content being posted on the sites blog.

The question is how much link juice does this homepage pass to the category pages, and from the category pages then to the product pages, and what influence does this have on rankings?

I ask because I have seen strong ecommerce sites with very strong DA or domain PR but with no backlinks to the product page/category page that are being ranked in the top 10 of search results often, for the respective category and product pages.

It therefore leads me to assume that internal links must have a strong determiner on search rankings...

Could it therefore also be assumed that a site with a PR of 5 and no links to a specific product page, would rank higher than a site with a PR of 1 but with 100 links pointing to the specific product page? Assuming they were both trying to rank for the same product keyword, and all other factors were equal. Ie. neither of them built spammy links or over optimised anchor text?

Scenario 2

Does internal linking work both ways?

Whereas in my above example I spoke about the homepage carrying link juice downward to the inner category and product pages. Can a powerful inner page carry link juice upward to category pages and then the homepage.

For example, say the blogger who liked the kite stores blog content piece linked directly to the blog content piece from his site and the kite store blog content piece was hosted on www.xxxxxxx.com/blog/blogcontentpiece

As authority links are being built to this blog content piece page from other bloggers linking to it, will it then pass link juice up to the main blog category page, and then the kite sites main homepage?

And if there is a link with relevant anchor text as part of the blog content piece will this cause the link juice flowing upwards to be stronger?

I know the above is quite winded, but I couldn't find anywhere that explains the power of internal linking on SERP's...

Look forward to your replies on this....

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

The Pagerank of a page, no matter what page it is, will flow out of the page to the pages to which it is linked.  The amount of Pagerank that is passed to a specific page is determined the amount of pagerank the linking page has, the number of links on that page, and the subtraction of a certain percentage of Pagerank (because the algorithm determines that there will always be some lost).

Take your first example:
Let's say the homepage has 100 units of link juice (just work with me here).  And let's say the homepage has 16 links on it to 16 pages and the percentage of link juice lost off is 20% (I'm not aware they've ever told us exactly how much is lost).  After the 20% decrease, the homepage has 80 units of link juice to pass on to the linked pages.  Since there are 16 links, each page gets 5 units of link juice (80/16=5).

So, in the case of your first example, where a site's homepage has a lot of links coming to it and the category and product pages don't have any, that may be alright for them.  If they have a good link structure, they may pass enough Pagerank through their internal links to the category and product pages to give them enough authority to out rank other similar product pages.  This actually works very well for sites because typically you want the homepage to rank for more general keywords which are more competitive and category and product pages to rank for more specific keywords which are less competitive.  So, the pages that have the most authority are competing for the most competitive keywords.

In your second example, it works similarly, the blog pages each pass a certain amount of Pagerank to the homepage based on how many links each blog post gets (and how authoritative those links are) and how many links are on those blog post pages.  Each post may be passing only a small amount of Pagerank, but since the blog has a lot of blog posts all linking to the homepage, it starts to add up.  That builds up the Pagerank of the homepage, which can then be passed on the category and product pages.  You can also pass Pagerank directly to the product pages by linking to them in the blog posts.

As to whether having a relevant keyword in the anchor text increases the amount of Pagerank passed in the link, no it doesn't.  It can, however, contribute to the linked page's link reputation.  The anchor text in the links to a page are one signal to the search engines of what that page is about and, thus, what keywords that page should rank for.  So, having relevant keywords in the anchor text, can help a page to rank better for specific keywords because it increases the page's reputation for that keyword.  This, however, I believe has been somewhat weakened lately with Google's updates.  Do to spam abuse, I think Google has lessened the signal of anchor text.

I hope this to make it more clear for you.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com