There is a common sense in search engine optimization industry that in order to get high Google ranking, you must have more inbound links or external links than your competition. This is half true and recently I’ve came across the following question in a forum.
I have more inbound links than my competitors, but I have lower ranking. Why?
That’s a good question. In order to rank higher in Google, you must pay more attention to the internal linking of your websites.
Internal Linking Analysis
I’d like to use the keyword “computer” as the example of my illustration below. Let’s take the keyword “computer” and do a search in Google.
If you don’t see the exact result as shown in the picture above, don’t worry, because Google has implemented personalized search which makes the search results vary across different users.
In the picture, you can see that “en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer”" is ranked higher than “www.dell.com”. You may just says there is nothing wrong and think that “www.dell.com” are having more inbound links than “en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer”". But the case is this is not true.
I’m going to show you some of my analysis.
Inbound links of “en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer”: 568
Internal links of “en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer”: 827
Inbound links of “www.dell.com”: 7,630
Internal links of “www.dell.com”: 107
From just the inbound links it would look like “www.dell.com” should be ranked higher than “en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer”". At the first glance both websites are well targeted for the phrase “computer”. So you might be scratching your head wondering why “www.dell.com” isn’t ranked better for the key phrase.
Now let’s look at the internal linking. The internal link is the link from an internal web page to another web page. The total number of internal links of “en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer”" is greater than “www.dell.com”. That’s the reason Google gives better ranking to “en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer”".
The Logic Behind Internal Linking
Internally, Google has a way to transfer authority from the home page to the inner pages of sites. That’s the reason you often find a high page ranking for a competitive keywords even though it has very few inbound links to the page itself. If the site itself is very well linked, then the inner pages get the benefits from the link juice of the whole site. Not only links to the home page of the site give the inner pages authority, but I also realized that it’s the entire site’s links that create authority.
If you have an incredibly huge number of links aimed at your site (like Wikipedia, which has tens of million links collectively), then you can rank very well for most anything. Each untargeted link is only counted a little bit by Google, but when you have tens of million links, the sum of “a little bit” is a lot.
Conclusion
Having the understanding of Google authority makes it much easier for you to analyze competition for any keywords you’re targeting in Google. So all of us should not just focus on building inbound links or external links. We should always make sure we have strong internal linking strategy in place because Google also considers internal links when deciding the ranking of a web page in the search results.
Please post your thoughts in the comment box below.
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{ 17 comments… read them below or add one }
Hmm, a bit difficult to understand for beginner like me. Does that mean having a lot of internal links for a particular keywords in my website will increase the ranking in search engine?
@Alvin,
For internal linking, you no need to just target a particular keyword. You can try to build the links targeting different keywords or phrases. Just make sure you inter-link your blog posts or web pages. Of course don’t forget to get external links.
I see. Thanks for the info
You said “The internal links of “www.seo.com” are greater than “www.seo-usa.org”. ” but the numbers are higher for seo-usa.org in your stats, kindly confirm. That is confusing for me.
@Sanjeev,
I’ve replace the example with a correct one. Thanks for pointing out.
Don’t you just hate it when you use a bad example and get called on it!
Internal linking is actually not difficult at all. It is merely about linking your pages. That is why we use the hub and spoke system of web design. The home page acts like a hub that links to your other pages. This is very effective with smaller sites. We also use our blog posts to link to our sales pages.
@Boris,
I’m not totally agree with you. Not only we should link from home page to other pages, we should also link from inner pages to our home page and other inner pages. Inner linking is important because if search engine bot access your website from inner page URL, then the bot has the chance to follow the links inside inner page and crawl your other pages. Not only that, it also give a chance to your visitors to click the link and read your other pages.
Yes i agree, internal linking play very important role.
What we normally do is, from each internal page we give link to home page of the website. And Many times we put the important page links in the footer of home page.
This helps a lot.
We are specialized in SEO for joomla website.
Joomla is Content Management System.
Regards
Joomla SEO Experts
Thanks a lot Bey Luen, this helped me a lot. I am working as an intern to a analytical marketing company and they have assigned me for SEO through inbound linking and SMO. However I have been inbound linking a lot and yet not got good results. With you advice here on internal links and and relevancy of content, I think things may change.
Thanks again, you’re a life saver
@Zaheen,
I’m great to hear that this article help you a lot in your assignment. You can share with us the result after some time. Wish you have a great intern experience.
@Bey
Very well Bey, with experts like you blogging with authority, seekers lik us will always find the routes to destinations.
Thank you…
I am reading a book called Search Engine Marketing, Inc, it touch on topics of link popularity as one of the way to help increase search engine ranking, I didn’t know internal linking will help as much too. Does that mean if I link my own blog post to every of my new post (like you did in Related Post) and previous and next post my internal linking will be higher?
@Lawrence,
Yes, related post, previous post and next post certainly will help your internal linking and and search engine ranking. Another good technique is putting a link inside your post content. For example, if you’re writing a post related to how to choose dog food, perhaps you can make a link pointing to another post talking about a specific type of dog food. I’m always this technique quite often.
Hello,
I am doing link building in a proper way of my website http://www.mywebautocenter.com/
But the problem is my website’s inner pages keywords are not getting ranked though my homepage keywords are ranked in a very good position…
So can anyone just tel me why my inner pages keywords are not getting in rankings???
what may be the reason??
Thanx..
Hey used Motorhomes just target your internal page related keyword but make sure your targeted keyword must have related inner page. If you’re targeting “Used Motorhomes” then use keyword density in content for this keyword!!!
Just use your own strategy !!!!
All the Best
Thanks for all the help you guys
Its not just linking to just any website. It is linking to top ranking websites.
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