Hey there, I have a few questions about internal website linking and how it effects SEO. Let's say your keywords are freelance programming, freelance programmers, and custom software development. 1. I was going to have a webpage called find-a-coder.cfm. However, I was thinking about naming this freelance-programmers.cfm. The later would probably be better for SEO correct? Please note, that this is going to contain thousands of coders spread across hundreds of pages. I was told that freelance-programmers.cfm?page=1 and freelance-programmers.cfm?page=2 are two seperate pages for search engines. Would having hundreds of freelance-programmers.cfm pages be overkill? Would this hurt me or help me? 2. Now, let's say you have two links on your home page both to the freelance-programmers.cfm webpage. I was told that google only counts this as one outbound link even though it appears in two places on the home page. Is this correct? What happens when I use two different keyword anchor texts for both of these links? My thinking is if I use freelance programming as the anchor for one link and freelance programmers for the anchor text of the other link, google will associate those pages with those keywords. Is that correct? 3. Now, for the third question you will have to glance at my home page here: http://www.codebuyers.com/ Do you see how I have links right under the "Freelance Programming" header? If I took away the underline, would that be considered black hat? 4. I was also consider linking "out-of-the-box software packages" to the find-a-package page. However, if I did that, I would have three links very close togather. Is having several links grouped togather like that bad for SEO? Thanks for any advice you can give me with these issues. It will be greatly appreciated. Sincerely, Travis Walters
1) Yes, freelance-programmers.cfm would be better unless you think people will be searching for "find a coder". Multiple pages of similar results isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, Ive found it to be good with end-of-tail search terms. Just don't expect all of them to be indexed unless they get in-bound links. 2) I believe that is correct (only one link counts if 2 link to the same page). If you use different anchor text, I don't think Google will use it for association (just like it wont use it for PR value). I would only suggest linking twice if it makes sense for the user. 3) No. It's still a link. Again, my question would be "how does this work for the user?" Will they recognize it as a link, etc ? 4) I'll let others chime in on this one...
get links from freelance related sites with High Page Rank, ranking will be refelected as soon as possible
you might want to find a way to segment it. like if people search for freelance coders in new york etc...But don't think it would be overkill, just might be a more SEO savvy way to sort them than just a page 1 page 2 page 3 etc...
Hey there, At the very least, I can have a customized search on the left so the results can be filtered by location. Once I get about 10,000 coders from all around the world, maybe I could do something like.. coders/US/ coders/Canada/ etc.. depending where all of my coders are located. Maybe something better would be like this.. find-a-coder.cfm?location=Canada find-a-coder.cfm?location=France That way I would not have to create 50 million directories. On another note, my friend showed me a website called googlefight.com, so I compared "freelance programmers" to "find a coder" and they are about equal. So I guess this is not worth changing. I can customize the coder search for "find a coder" and do something else for the other key phrase. Since the links I described above were already linked to those pages with different anchor text, I decided to delete the links in the header. I think I was making it more for search engines than users when I had them there, so it is probably better now. Thanks everyone for the help. It was really appreciated. Sincerely, Travis Walters