Linking within your site

Does linking to lots of other pages within your own site have any effect on rankings? I link the front page of my site to many of the other pages on my site. I have no external links to any other site just my own.

 

How many is lots in your case?

 

I believe the effect will be the same if you have a sitemap or sidemenu. The main reason to have internal link to other pages within your own site is for spider crawling. If you already have a sitemap in footer column, you don't have to link it within content area.

 

thanks for the replies. I have a site that sells merchandise and I link to products within the site that are new, on sale or featured and also have a list of category links on the side bar. I have many images on the front page and links with descriptions under them.

 

Well, if the links count does not exceed 100 on a page you're safe

 

If the length of the links are short, then they will not carry much weight.

Proper internal linking is key to good SEO & ranking in the SERPs.

 

I have two paragraphs of descriptive text on my front page that have several links in them to other pages within my site also.

If I remove the active links in these two paragraphs but leave the paragraphs of text on the page would that change anything in the way the front page ranks? I am trying to reduce the number of links on the front page but dont want to mess anything up in my current ranking.

 

The links from you home page should only go to the main landing pages for your site. That way, you don't waste the available page rank by linking to unimportant pages.

 

So is removing links from my front page but leaving the text from the link there going to change anything?

 

Your home page should link to all important pages on your site, and each page on your site should contain a link (preferably with varied anchor text) back to your home page. In this setup, PageRank is "recycled" as it travels from your homepage to your site pages and then back again to your homepage.

Number of site pages can be very important--larger sites have more PageRank, because google indexes individual pages, not websites. Each webpage is like its own mini-website, with its own PageRank. Some believe, and I think there's some validity to this, that a link from a page within your website is just as valuable as an "outside" link to your page.

Another important strategy: add the rel="nofollow" tag to ALL UNIMPORTANT links to pages on your site: Privacy Policy, About Us, etc. It looks like this: <a rel="nofollow" href="blah.com">Anchor Text</a> Google does not send PageRank through to these pages if the nofollow tag is included; thus, more PageRank is available to be sent throughout the rest of the site.

I used this strategy (among others) for my anniversary gift website in my signature, and it went from PR0 to PR5 in approximately 4 months (it's very first PR update). I was blown away.

Thanks,
Paul

 

sure,linking of all the pages within your site

 

yea, of course, internal linking is very important

 

Why 100? Is that for external links or internal links. I would think that you should not have more than 100 external links on each page as it will make it look like a link farm, but internal links would be different.

Google Webmaster Guidelines just says you should not have more than 100 links on each page, but they don't mention if it's 100 internal or external or both.

I would think it's both the way they say it, but if it is then about 40% or more of sites have broken the Google Webmaster Guidelines. It could even be much more than 40%.

Even Yahoo has more than 100 links on their homepage, well they did previously anyway unless they have changed it.

Even these forums most probably has more than 100 links on some of the pages, if not quite a few of them.

You have max 4 links in everyones signature, about 20 - 30 posts per page. You then have the breadcrumb navigation, the links down the bottom of the site, the main menu area, etc.

 

yeah, it will effect. they are called in site links