Consider Your Internal Link Network

Written by: Gary Horsman

Link Network – Consider Your Internal Link Network

Build Page Rank by Building & Developing Your Internal Link Network 

You need to help your search engine ranking cause by developing the link network of your pages.

You can control a certain part of your page’s link network as you can control the internal (within your own site) linking.

For example, do you have some links from your home page going to deeper internal pages as part of your link network made with some important keyword text? If you don’t then you should. 

Here are three key internal link building activities to help your pages gain page rank and search position:

1. Build links from your home page to your most important Tier II or even Tier III pages.
2. Use keyword phrases in these links.
3. Create internal linking loops to build up the page rank of multiple pages and to increase the value of the in-coming links to any of the pages in the internal loop.

If you create an internal link network you will help to let Page Rank flow freely throughout your site. If you have an internal blog then don’t add nofollow on your links to your category or your archive pages allow these pages to be found and to enjoy an increase in page rank as well.

There are some pages where you may want to add the nofollow attribute. For example you do not need to show the search engines your subscriber login page as a search engine spider is not going to log into your site. You also do not need to have them detect your RSS feed page as the search engines do not want to display RSS feed pages in their search results. There may be other links that you do not want the search engine spiders to follow – think out and plan out your internal links well.  

As a final comment you should always give some good thought to which external pages you link to. I know many people that feel that they do not want to make external links because it will bleed page rank. While this may be true consider that Google respects and encourages you to make links off your site to content that it has high regard for. The major search engines view this as positive as you are adding value for your visitors. Therefore, you can still gain some credit from Google for linking to other high page rank pages.