Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Should my back links go to home page or internal pages
-
Right now we rank on page 2 for many KWs, so should i now focus my attention on getting links to my home page to build domain authority or continue to direct links to the internal pages for specific KWs?
I am about to write some articles for several good ranking sites and want to know whether to link my company name (same as domain name) or KW to the home page or use individual KWs to the internal pages - I am only allowed one link per article to my site.
Thanks
Ash
-
Always link by page and subject matter. If you have an article about red widgets, you should link back to the page you have about red widgets. True you can build up your home page with a lot of links, but this hurts your user experience by making them have to go through the entire site to find what they came there for.
When you send all your links to the homepage, you are suggesting what page is the most important to search engines. This can often be seen where you have sites that never have any subpages ranking or showing up in search results, only the home page over and over. Sounds great doesnt it? But you can limit the exposure of your site in the long run. By directing links at your subpages, not only do you increase the chance that they will eventually rank higher, you also can get more specific with your linking text.
Direct keyword linking to the home page is more risky. With your subpage links, you can get closer or even use exact keyword phrase links because the content is more specific. In reality, use whatever link phrase that a user will click on. A bunch of keywords might not do that job as well as a conversion statement. If you are worried about getting people to your home page, change the way the subpages are set up on your site, so that users can go to the other relevant areas of your site with ease. It should be easy and simple to direct them where you want them to go using graphics or styled text.
-
I agree with SilverDoor & donford!
Relevancy! Relevancy! Relevancy!
Don't get too caught up in your domain authority or page rank. Build naturally (for the users of your site)... and it all shall come
-
Completely agree with SilverDoor (thumbs up). Backlinks should always point to the most relevant page.
The way I always approach it by not driving myself nuts over pushing up Domain Authority or a certain page's Page Rank rather focus on the unique content that will drive itself to get links. Once you have the content in place, you of course have to do some work getting yourself noticed, but once that happens you'll find backlinks coming from multiple places with no additional work required.
-
Hi Ash,
The best way to work out where you should point the backlink to is by asking yourself this question:
What is the most related and useful page on my website for the article I have written?
Take it from a readers perspective. Would they prefer to go to your homepage or a more specific internal page?
Once you can answer that question then you know where to link to.
Make sure to not over-optimise the keywords you use for your anchor text.Just put them on the most natural, relevant word in your article.
Hope this helps.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Company Name in Home Page Title? If and Where?
My guess is you want to do the {title} | {company name} format as I would suspect Google gives slightly more weight to the words at the beginning of the title? (This is assuming your company name isn't a generic word or you are specifically trying to rank your home page for your company name when it isn't ranking well already) But what about cases where you have like 5 or 6 keywords that are really important and used in the title gives you like 50 characters and your company name pushed it up to like 65 increasing the chance Google will use some other source to list the name of your home page in the search results? Obviously one can experiment, but wondering what the general consensus is - long keyword title, or longer title with company name? The company name can be included in the meta description and the domain name of the url displayed also gives the indication to the company. But maybe the algo "respects" long itles that have company name more than ones without as then it looks more like a keyword stuffing title? So many factors to consider. Yes - on page SEO isn't just about the title, but for this thread I'm just talking home page title.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wizkids9641 -
Pages with excessive number of links
Hi all, I work for a retailer and I've crawled our website with RankTracker for optimization suggestions. The main suggestion is "Pages with excessive number of links: 4178" The page with the largest amount of links has 634 links (627 internal, 7 external), the lowest 382 links (375 internal, 7 external). However, when I view the source on any one of the example pages, it becomes obvious that the site's main navigation header contains 358 links, so every new page starts with 358 links before any content. Our rivals and much larger sites like argos.co.uk appear to have just as many links in their main navigation menu. So my questions are: 1. Will these excessive links really be causing us a problem or is it just 'good practice' to have fewer links
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bee159
2. Can I use 'no follow' to stop Google etc from counting the 358 main navigation links
3. Is have 4000+ pages of your website all dumbly pointing to other pages a help or hindrance?
4. Can we 'minify' this code so it's cached on first load and therefore loads faster? Thank you.0 -
Do I have to many internal links which is diluting link juice to less important pages
Hello Mozzers, I was looking at my homepage and subsequent category landing pages on my on my eCommerce site and wondered whether I have to many internal links which could in effect be diluting link juice to much of the pages I need it to flow. My homepage has 266 links of which 114 (43%) are duplicate links which seems a bit to much to me. One of my major competitors who is a national company has just launched a new site design and they are only showing popular categories on their home page although all categories are accessible from the menu navigation. They only have 123 links on their home page. I am wondering whether If I was to not show every category on my homepage as some of them we don't really have any sales from and only concerntrate on popular ones there like my competitors , then the link juice flowing downwards in the site would be concerntated as I would have less links for them to flow ?... Is that basically how it works ? Is there any negatives with regards to duplicate links on either home or category landing page. We are showing both the categories as visual boxes to select and they are also as selectable links on the left of a page ? Just wondered how duplicate links would be treated? Any thoughts greatly appreciated thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Multiple Internal links to same destinations
My company is redoing our homepage and there will be 4 links to our main play pages (5 games). 2 in the menu and 2 within the content. I was thinking I should no follow one of the links on the homepage + 1 in the menu so that we don't have link dilution from having multiple internal links to the same destination within 1 page. Does this make sense? Any downside of this or suggestions of a solution that may be more effective? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Do search engines crawl links on 404 pages?
I'm currently in the process of redesigning my site's 404 page. I know there's all sorts of best practices from UX standpoint but what about search engines? Since these pages are roadblocks in the crawl process, I was wondering if there's a way to help the search engine continue its crawl. Does putting links to "recent posts" or something along those lines allow the bot to continue on its way or does the crawl stop at that point because the 404 HTTP status code is thrown in the header response?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brad-causes0 -
Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?
I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together. The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page. My question is: Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lara_dar
...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage? (the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text) I am in two minds (a & b!) (a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar (b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage. What do you think? Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)0 -
Is it better "nofollow" or "follow" links to external social pages?
Hello, I have four outbound links from my site home page taking users to join us on our social Network pages (Twitter, FB, YT and Google+). if you look at my site home page, you can find those 4 links as 4 large buttons on the right column of the page: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/ Here is my question: do you think it is better for me to add the rel="nofollow" directive to those 4 links or allow Google to follow? From a PR prospective, I am sure that would be better to apply the nofollow tag, but I would like Google to understand that we have a presence on those 4 social channels and to make clearly a correlation between our official website and our official social channels (and then to let Google understand that our social channels are legitimate and related to us), but I am afraid the nofollow directive could prevent that. What's the best move in this case? What do you suggest to do? Maybe the nofollow is irrelevant to allow Google to correlate our website to our legitimate social channels, but I am not sure about that. Any suggestions are very welcome. Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau9 -
NOINDEX listing pages: Page 2, Page 3... etc?
Would it be beneficial to NOINDEX category listing pages except for the first page. For example on this site: http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/101/fsx-missions/ Has lots of pages such as Page 2, Page 3, Page 4... etc: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aflyawaysimulation.com+fsx+missions Would there be any SEO benefit of NOINDEX on these pages? Of course, FOLLOW is default, so links would still be followed and juice applied. Your thoughts and suggestions are much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640
