I’ve seen a fair bit of discussion about the effects of internal linking on a website and it’s effects on SEO recently. Some refer to this as “Link sculpting” which is a techie way of saying getting clever with your site navigation. Whatever you call it, there are some interesting theories that have supposedly been put to the test and delivered results for people. The one that interested me the most was the use of the “nofollow” tag on HREF anchors to “sculpt” PageRank. Let me explain.
Essentially Google “PR” – (PageRank – you’ll have to research that if you don’t know what it is) still plays a part in ranking. The PR Google hordes is different to, or at least months ahead of, the PR you see for a page on the Google toolbar but while no-one knows it’s full effects, it’s important enough to care about when doing SEO. The “trick” is to ensure that your main pages have as much PR as possible, while pages that are generally supplemental (Contact Us, Disclaimers etc) should horde litle and instead pass on as much as possible elsewhere.
In general PR comes from inbound links from other sites, but the way you handle this internally can have a noticable impact on search engine ranking. There are one or two tricks that are employed to do this, as follows:
Firstly, use the “nofollow” attribute when linking to your supplemental pages to avoid passing valuable PR to essentially useless pages. You don’t want your “Disclaimer” page ranking high in Google when your main sales come from your product pages, so wherever you link to the disclaimer on your site, add a “nofollow”. On the Disclaimer page itself ensure you link to your home page, as you should on every page, however this is where trick 2 comes in.
Trick 2 is to vary the anchor text of your links back to the homepage, using keywords and phrases that relate to your site’s content. For example, don’t always link back using “Home” – or if you do, add a “nofollow” to those links and add second links to the homepage, preferably within the text of the page itself. If your site theme is “Package Holidays”, then link back within articles using varying, similar words and phrases. “Holidays”, “Cheap Package Holidays”, “Holiday Deals” etc. There is no need to go overboard and make every link different, but perhaps limit them to 10-15 instances per phrase, or on smaller sites, use each once or twice. Which leads us nicely onto Trick 3:
This third trick is to use “LSA” - Latent Semantic Analysis! Sound technical? Not really – all it means is related words, but finding those words is the key. What you might consider related isn’t necessarily what Google thinks is related. That’s not to say you shouldn’t use them anyway, but it helps to know which phrases Google relates.
At Google’s end, this is called “LSI” – Latent Semantic Indexing of course, duh! To find what Google sees as related words, go to Google and type in your word with a tilde (~) in front, IE: “~holidays”. Now, look at the search results and note the words in Bold type. these are words Google relates to Holidays. Use some of these in your internal links, and also external links linking to you. Generally you won’t find that many, but use those you do and add some of your own to the anchor text.
Having all your incoming (external) links from other sites with the same anchor text raises a red flag at the Googleplex and potentially indicates that you are trying to “game” your site, which could eventually give you a penalty. Always try and vary your anchor text on external links while keeping to the central theme of your site. This is where LSA is essential stuff. My own opinion here is that it’s worth including some of these related words within the text or your article to help relevancy, but others argue it makes litle difference. As long as it reads right and is clearly not done for SEO and at the expense of clear, sensible writing technique, it certainly can’t hurt.
One final point relating to internal links. I can’t verify this (yet) but I read it from a user on WebmasterWorld and it seems logical. He(?) said it was sensible to follow the “site tree” when linking down, and if for any reason you had to bypass a level within an article, use the “nofollow” tag on that too. The upshot being that you guide the search engines down the hierarchy of your site in a logical fashion, even if sometimes a user would benefit from a jump further down (or up) the tree.
That’s it. Whatever you do, tread carefully and be wary of thousands of obvious SEO changes to your site all in one go as more red flags could be raised. Be patient and change gradually, measure the effect of one small change before making wholesale changes would be my advice.