What is a Good Internal Linking Structure?
September 15th, 2008 | 43 comments
I was recently asked a few questions at Coaching with Josh in regards to Internal Linking Structures.
It’s no secret that the way in which we link our pages from within is extremely important for both the user and the Search Engines, but there is very little in regards to exactly WHAT a good internal linking structure is.
I’ve actually spoken about Internal linking many times before on this blog and elsewhere, but as far as I know I’ve never actually said exactly what constitutes a good internal linking structure.
Which Type of Structure Should I Use?
Firstly, you should know that there are many different types of internal linking structures… flat structures, pyramid structures, silo structures etc. etc. I won’t be going over each of these in this blog post because for one I’m not an expert on each and every one and for two, most people don’t need to know, as many of the “structures” are not necessary unless you want to do some extremely advanced SEO testing.
What I will be going over is the basics of internal linking. So, to answer the subtopic question, None in particular 
You just need to understand the basic principles to authority flow and attribution.
It All Comes Down to Authority (PageRank, whatever you want to call it)
Most people refer to it as “PageRank” because that’s what Google calls it, although there are 2 different types of PageRank, I call it authority. Whatever you want to call it, it’s what we must control!
If you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about, I’m talking about the “power” each of our pages receives in the Search Engines every time a new link is pointed to them.
How Authority is Passed
Every page on the Internet, that has been indexed, receives a certain amount of authority. Each Search Engine calculates this level individually, but in general a page with a lot of good links pointing to it will rank well on most major SE’s.
Each page also passes authority! There isn’t really a standard metric for counting authority other than Googles flawed “PageRank” system, so we’ll use Google Toolbar PageRank as an example… just understand it’s only an example!
Lets say a page has a PR of 6 and the page contains 20 links, each going to different pages. Each of these 20 links are going to get an equal amount of that PR6. Of course there is probably a little more to it than that, but in general the authority is split up between each link on the page whether it’s external (to someone elses site) or Internal (to another page/directory on the site.)
If you understand that, you’ll understand the entire concept of Internal Linking! That’s really all there is to the thinking behind it.
Your most important pages should be linked to site-wide! Many websites and blogs use categories to organize their content. So, each category page should be linked to on each and every page on your site. It’s also a good idea to link to your most important “money pages” or pages your visitors really need to see and pages you want to rank more than others. The more internal pages you are linking to on each page, and the fewer external links you are linking to, the more authority your site as a whole will maintain, which it can continue to circulate!
If you have a “thin” site with 20 or fewer pages, you should be linking to each and every page ON each and every page. Site structure complete… that easy!
When you’re dealing with sites with 100 or so pages, you should have your category pages, or other main categorization pages, linked to on each page, plus any individual pages you believe are more important.
When you’re dealing with sites with thousands of pages you have to get creative and come up with unique site structures to ensure your content gets indexed and accrues authority!
And remember, if any of your sites links are contained within Javascript, they won’t be followed by SE’s. In other words, those links don’t exist from a SEO standpoint!
So now that I’ve given you a good explanation as to what a good internal linking structure should consist of, get to work on your own sites You can actually increase your own SE rankings by improving your sites internal linking structure!
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15th September, 2008 at 7:29 pm
Hi Josh great article, I been trying your others methods that you provide in your e-book its been a great help, I’ll planning to be changing by blog a little so Josh until next time.
15th September, 2008 at 7:38 pm
Josh,
I think I understand what your point is here. Is that why it is important to use sections in the sidebar for “Most Popular Posts” and “Recent Posts”?
Do these links count as internal links when considering page rank?
15th September, 2008 at 7:39 pm
Josh, you answered some very important questions for me as I am working on a templated site for financial advisors, some of which want to harness search engine traffic for their local areas. Excellent post.
However, one question I have for you is that you seem to “switch directions” in your description above.
If we are getting inbound links through various means to our “category pages”, then it seems that we need that category page to link to every page on our site.
What you say above is to have every page on our site link to our category pages and any other really important page. So that would be internal INBOUND links to our important pages, rather than outbound internal links from those pages.
So that’s a bit confusing.
However, with the way I have the site set up, I don’t actually have a category page — it redirects to the first page in the dropdown menu under the category.
So would this work instead?
At the end of every single page, have a script that lists the categories and the titles of pages under the categories, linking to that page?
That way, no matter which page an advisor chooses to really promote through article marketing or other means, the PR from that page will get spread around.
Because each advisor will focus on promoting different aspects of this site.
Thanks!
15th September, 2008 at 8:16 pm
thanks for giving me direction on internal linking, as I have been clueless.
In regards to the rel=”nofollow” attribute, is it ethical, right, etc. to use this attribute on outgoing links for published articles from ezinearticles.com and other article sites?
15th September, 2008 at 8:43 pm
Very informative post. I use the rel=no follow on my affiliate links and such.
15th September, 2008 at 8:53 pm
I also found the article a bit confusing. Wouldn’t it be preferable to put the rel=”nofollow” attribute on links to EXTERNAL sites than INTERNAL links???
I think it would be much better advice to suggest putting the “no follow” tag on links that are going out to external sites. That way you are restricting the flow of authority to other external sites rather than restricting authority to pages on your own site.
Why would you not recommend using the rel=”no follow” attribute on external links?
15th September, 2008 at 9:13 pm
The question I’ve never heard answered in this regard is this:
When crating an internal link to the root of your site, do you link to mydomainname.com (which appears to be an external link. Or should you like to the root document itself (i.e., index.html or index.php…which resembles standard internal linking structure?
15th September, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Great point about using nofollow on affiliate links. Its common sense really but I never thought of it. thanks!
15th September, 2008 at 10:23 pm
I hadn’t considered nofollowing my affiliate links, but it makes sense. Will look my stuff over with a fresh angle. Thanks!
15th September, 2008 at 10:25 pm
Wouldnt it be handy if WordPress offered the nofollow feature as an option on each link?
Currently I type it into the HTML every time, along with: target=”_blank”
Does anyone know of a plugin that helps here?
Gary
15th September, 2008 at 11:04 pm
The no follow on the contact link was something i totally overlooked and changed today. Another simple but informative post.
15th September, 2008 at 11:11 pm
Thanks Josh,
When I found that internal links helped with authority I was amazed. And I started linking to other posts at the end of each post (when relevant).
I have recently been reduced to dialup (yeesh, a lesson in how to handle frustration) and so haven’t been doing many links. My Technorati ranking has been sinking. Linking really makes a difference.
Thanks for another great article.
16th September, 2008 at 1:26 am
Hi Josh, this is really a good post.
‘A Few Things to Be Careful of’ is new info for me, thank’s for sharing.
16th September, 2008 at 2:34 am
Great detail, things are so much clearer for me now on the whole internal linking debate. Thanks Josh.
16th September, 2008 at 4:07 am
What do you mean by a category page? Aren’t a number of posts contained under a particular category?
16th September, 2008 at 9:22 am
@ Gushin – Yes, all links count, that’s the point.
@ Sarah – I’m not sure I understand what you mean, or where the confusion is, but in the situation I explained above, EVERY page would be linking to the category pages and the handful of important pages. When I say EVERY I mean every, so the category pages would be linking to the category pages as well etc.
As far as your own linking structure I don’t know. I’d have to see it.
@ Wes – I guess you’re referring to syndication from a publishers point of view? Legally it depends on the TOS of the article directory. Ethically it’s not cool.
@ Max – I’m not sure who didn’t recommend nofollowing external links like social bookmarking sites and any other links that doesn’t need authority, but it wasn’t me. If you want to nofollow EVERY external link you may find your site being penalized for not participating in the WWW You may want to re-read the post
@ Chuck – I wouldn’t ever recommend linking to your index file. That’s a different URL with the same exact content of your root. It won’t get you a penalty, but if in some way your index file obtains more initial authority your root may be deindexed.
I always link to the actual domain mysite.com/
@ Gary – A plugin like that would be neat I suppose, depending on what it nofollowed. I’m sure there’s a plugin like that out there. If not it would be easy to make.
@ David – When I say category page I just mean important categorization pages. I’m not speaking in regards to blogs specifically. I was just using that type of page as an example.
16th September, 2008 at 1:00 pm
What is your dofollow count based on?
I have definitely made more than 2 comments. What field are you matching on?
16th September, 2008 at 1:25 pm
@ It matches the name, email and URL. Please read my comment policy for further info!
Ideally a comment is made because the viewer wants to add his or her 2 cents, not to get a link!!
16th September, 2008 at 2:16 pm
I really am interested in the blog post information and discuss the topic at hand. I don’t just provide a rah, rah, rah post.
However, if a link is offered, I don’t want to miss it.
16th September, 2008 at 2:43 pm
@ David – Nothing wrong with that. I think I took it the wrong way. Yeah, the it takes 9 approved comments for them to become followed and there is also a delay of several hours after each becomes followed each time.
16th September, 2008 at 5:38 pm
I’ve been doing things and didn’t realize it. More nuggets here also, thanks Josh.
Where “within” the link do you put the no-follow….can you sample a link for me please.
16th September, 2008 at 7:30 pm
Thanks Josh for clearing up some confusion and clarifying this idea of internal vs external linking and the effect it has on SEO. I was wondering, do you think key word density can affect linking strategies?
16th September, 2008 at 7:58 pm
My home page has a PR of 4, but looking at any individual post or other page that disappears. On my home page I have the first few paragraphs of the latest 5 posts. How does this affect linking strategy? David
16th September, 2008 at 9:08 pm
Internal on-site SEO is so important, also on blogs, internal link with keywords to other posts, this works great for SEO and bounce rate as well.
Thanks Josh,
JR
17th September, 2008 at 5:35 am
Hi Josh,
Another question came to mind.
Does having different formats of permalink (as below) affect the search engines when we link? This is assuming we use wp i guess.
a) /%category%/%postname%/
OR
b) /%postname%/
Which is preferred?
Thanks
18th September, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Yoshiko, to answer your question, I think it depends on which linking structure you are employing.
If you use silo and you are consistent on your linking, you establish the virtual silos through the links, but you may also do so using the virtual directory, like in the first example you provide.
19th September, 2008 at 12:35 am
Josh,
As always, practical real world information that helps to improve our business.
I’ve said it before, thank you for your hard work.
Best,
Scott
19th September, 2008 at 1:28 am
For the WP plugin idea, I had one of my webguys just add the custom field option, so that I can choose for that link to have a nofollow.
It’s the same custom field function that allows me to add pages but put in the word “hidden” so that the link does not show on the site.
(I do this because I only want the highest impact posts to be offered in links at the bottom of the articles. Other good articles for search engine attraction are great for landing pages, but may overlap in topic enough that I only want one offered as a choice at the bottom of every article.)
Right now, Josh, on our website, we have every page on the site that we want to be found as an option/link at the bottom of every article. The highest value ones are also in the dropdown menus at the top of the header.
What was confusing in your post is that you seemed to say that you should have your category pages linking OUT to every other page. I see I missed one word, and that the idea is to have the category pages linked to FROM every other page.
In our case, our pages number less than 100 right now, and lesser articles being added do not have to be “do follow” or show, because of the custom field function I described above.
So I’m linking to every most important content page on the site, but the SEO-interested sites will put link bait articles for local keywords, and then link from that article to all the main ones.
Anyway, good stuff, and thanks for this. I think I have it straight, and yes, we were doing it “right”. I just added a few more due to your post, and changed some anchor text to improve it even more.
Thanks again.
19th September, 2008 at 8:37 am
Yeah, thanks Hendry.
I did some research and found a very clear descriptive diagram which explains it all at http://www.ethicalinternetmarketer.com/internet-marketing/the-new-seo-part-2-theming-your-website-using-silo-structures/
19th September, 2008 at 12:23 pm
@ Dennis – Great, glad to help. Please this post for an answer to your question.
@ Stewart – I don’t worry about keyword density and I’m not sure how they would effect linking one way or another? The only text that matters in regards to linking is anchor text.
@ David – It sounds like your internal pages aren’t getting enough juice. If you’re only linking to 5 pages on your homepage, you need to increase that.
@ Yoshiko – Either way is fine.
@ Sarah – Great to hear
Keep up the good work.
21st September, 2008 at 3:58 am
Can you please provide an example of a site that links to every other page from each page?
Once you reach a certain number, wouldn’t it scroll off the page?
21st September, 2008 at 1:54 pm
[...] reading Josh Spaulding’s recent article about maximizing PageRank/Authority through smart internal linking, I realized that a traditional Blogroll just doesn’t make much sense from an optimization [...]
22nd September, 2008 at 2:00 pm
Thanks Josh, the way your put it in simple terms for us simple minded folks is great!
I hear so much about it, but never has it been explained so simply, so thanks for that man.
23rd September, 2008 at 11:37 am
Great tip about not linking to your Contact page. I will be adding the nofollow to those links asap on all my websites.
25th November, 2008 at 6:08 pm
I had never thought of adding “nofollow” to my contact page links.
What about not linking to 95% of external links? Would that get penalized? I used to get a crapload of spam because I didn’t use “nofollow” at all. So I started using “nofollow” and that eliminated the spam. Now I only manually “dofollow” links, which are normally very few links.
I “nofollow” all links unless it is to someone I know personally or a site that I highly recommend. So would I get penalized for that?
25th November, 2008 at 6:51 pm
@ David – Sure, I have all internal pages linked to on all pages at http://www.gethomemortgageloan.com/
Yes, that’s why I recommend linking to all pages ON all pages for “thin” sites with only a few pages.
@ Dennis – No you would definitely not get penalized for nofollowing external linsks. If you DON’T nofollow links that are blackhat you could get penalized though.
3rd December, 2008 at 2:51 pm
It was only after I’ve read your post that I realized that internal linking was important.
Does this mean that as long as your internal links out-number your external links you should come out ahead?
How about making some external links “nofollow” and leave the rest as it is?
8th January, 2009 at 6:53 am
Thanks for this valuable and informative post, Josh. I always knew that internal linking had some importance, but this has reinforced ways of excluding some of the pages that don’t need the authority, even though there is a link there.
Kind regards,
Barry
8th January, 2009 at 7:35 am
I recently ditched the tags system on my blog and will now have to implement some manual internal linking between posts. The main reason I ditched it was 1, it was not very aesthetically pleasing, and 2, it wouldn’t let me use say “internet marketing” for a tag and also “internet marketing” for a category. So I said to hell with it.
25th May, 2009 at 9:38 am
I agreed an organised linking structure is needed on larger sites. I now tend to favour the ‘organisation chart’ approach but seem to have reasonable success with the tag and category approach too.
25th May, 2009 at 8:23 pm
Josh, you wrote:
“I’m not sure who didn’t recommend nofollowing external links like social bookmarking sites and any other links that doesn’t need authority, but it wasn’t me”
So are you suggesting we shouldn’t include nofollow n links to some external pages? But not our own affiliate pages? How do we choose which external links to add nofollow to then? Do we remove the nofollow links just from the social bookmarking sites?
I read the article again. But I still don’t understand why you would put nofollow tags on your afiliate links – surely you want the page rank of of your affiliate links to have a high page rank no? For many people these are the most important pages to have a high page rank as these are the money pages.
The higher the page rank of my affiliate pages, the more sales are likley to be made.
20th June, 2009 at 3:39 am
Hi Josh, Someone asked but I didn’t see an answer. Do the links in the columns of your blog count as internal links for that page or do you have to have the links in each post?
21st December, 2009 at 3:29 pm
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