The Seo Classroom

Poor relevancy and crawling issues arise when a website’s internal linking structure is poorly planned. On average, I see websites everyday with each page that links to 30 other internal pages, all ‘follow’ links. This creates haywire for a search engine crawler and impedes Google’s ability to understand the relevancy of your webiste. Internal linking affects the relevancy of the site, the search engine crawling, and ranking–this theory has become accepted, and most good SEO’s know that when a website’s pages link to every other page on the site, without consideration of the nofollow tag, a website will have a harder time ranking in the search engines. Of course with enough powerful links any site can rank, but why not try to create a website that is properly structured so your off page optimization of linkbuilding reaps greater benefits.

Here is the strategy I recommend on internal linking, which is based on the Bruce Clay’s theory of Theming and Charles Heflin’s Theory of Siloing.

- Homepage should link to the top level category pages & the pages targeting keywords with high search volume.
- Each page should link to the next page as per the structure of the site.
- Each page should link back to the category main page.
- Some pages can link back to the homepage other pages when the keywords are closely related.
- While linking to any page, we will look for the related keywords as acnhors.
- Use nofollow when required. Create a virtual silo using the nofollow tags.

Let’s take a page out of Charles Heflin’s Book “The Master Plan” where he shows two diagrams of a poorly structured site and a well structured site.

Now lets look at this Silo’d site:

Example

Take a look at the site http://www.barbecuesandgrills.com/ and notice the nofollow links on the home page. 29 internal links, 6 nofollow tags; 4 external links, 3 nofollow. Go to any internal page, and there are always pages at the bottom that are nofolowed. Take a look at http://www.barbecuesandgrills.com/barbecues.aspx Again notice that 5 of the 33 internal links are nofollowed, and 3 of the 4 external links are nofollowed.

Understanding Internal Linking structure will make it easier for you to rank, as Google will understand the relevancy of your site much better. A virtual silo, using nofollow, or a directory silo site, will improve the site structure tremendously. For many sites, just adding rel=”nofollow” tags to certain urls, such as site wide footer links, allows the google robot to easily crawl and understand the site better

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