Internal page linking

[tb987]

A link from .gov,.edu or any newspapaer site counts a lot.

Surely in the UK it should be gov.uk and ac.uk. This is UK webmasterworld :lol:

The problem with newspapers is that they often use outbound click counters so the links may not count for anything from an SEO perspective or even worse they don't even hyperlink it...

 

[inertia]

Why people get hung up on these I'll never know. The amount of posts on forums I see exactly the same thing is unreal.

Don't bother chasing them. If you can obtain one then thats great.

Unless you have something like a site about Robotics and get a link from ucla.edu on their Robotic engineering page, it's pointless.

I'm 100% with OWG on this.

KP

I always figured that a link from a .gov .edu ect... sites were a great vote of confidence from a trusted domain making your domain look like an authority. If you're lucky enough to establish links on these TLDs then they are always on content relevant pages anyway. Other wise why would they have linked to you?

 

[BionicInternetLtd]

I thought this was the way it "worked"

You build up the page rank from external sites linking to your pages, i.e in forum Sigs etc. Then once you have a decent page rank i.e on your company forums you then do the same as you would externally but internally and so forth and your site almost becomes "self [FONT='Verdana','sans-serif']Sufficient " to a certain extent[/FONT]

 

[KingPin36]

Er..Inertia did you actually read my post?

Besides, I was talking more about getting a link from them just for a sake of a link.

KP

 

[OldWelshGuy]

If a site is professionally built for PEOPLE! Then you will have followed what search engines want by and large.

I and others have been saying this till we are blue in the face.

a) people want well titled pages,
b) people want links that help them identify what will be the content of the page at the other end of a click.
c) People want to know where they are on a site easily
d) People want to be able to navigate around a site easily
e) people want nice small pages that can be read easily and are covering one or very few topic.
f) People want that if a page is large it is split into sub topics and headed so they can skim to the relevant material on page
g) people want links from that page to related pages, if in the middle of the text contextually then better still
h) People would like to see links to other sites that are related to that topic
i) people with usability issues such as impaired eyesight would like to know that the image is a fluffy black and white kitten playing with a ball of yellow string (I bet you can now see that in your minds eye).
j) people want pages that load quickly and run smoothly (good code, but not necessarily WC3 compliant)
(There are other things as well but these are first draft off the top of my head.)

Search engines on the other hand want....... pretty much the same as people

Build for people, and there is hardly anything left to do for the search engines. Search engine friendly site design is basically people friendly site design with some backlinking.

 

[KingPin36]

^Voice of reason and extremely well put.

Kudos OWG.

KP

 

[inertia]

Er..Inertia did you actually read my post?

Besides, I was talking more about getting a link from them just for a sake of a link.

KP

Fair enough. I see what you are saying. But wouldn't you rather have an unrelated link on a .gov or .edu than not have one? I wouldn't say that it's "a waste of time".

I have a hip hop website. Say i know the webmaster who looks after somedepartment.gov and he offered me a link i would definitely say yes, even if it wasn't related. Its bound to make my site look more trust worthy!

 

[KingPin36]

Actually no, I wouldn't. I would rather than links related to my website.

I don't see how a link from, lets say, finance.gov to a adult.com would have any benefit what so ever.

In my experience and experiments Google wouldn't count the link half as much.

If any.

KP

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Irrelevant inbounds, especially from an authority could IMO do more harm than good.

 

[inertia]

Irrelevant inbounds, especially from an authority could IMO do more harm than good.

How could they possibly do any harm?! There's a huge thread over on WPW about this - Can Inbound Link Hurt You

At the last company i worked for we used to buy link packages from an Indian company. These were completely irrelevant links on PR3-5 pages, sharing the page with at least 30 other random links and using whatever link text we wanted.

These campaigns did well! So do irrelevant links really cause harm?

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Firstly you have misrepresented what I said, I didn't say 'irrelevant links really cause harm' I said an off topic link form an authority 'could' possibly do more harm than good.

My reasoning is this.:~
Authorities know their stuff. Government departments are tightly focused, an off topic link therefore could confuse the search engines into theming your site wrongly. Nothing more, nothing less. I was talking about theming sites and authority links, not off topic linking in general. Two completely different things, as low authority sites have low trust levels and as such probably can't carry much contextual power.

Hope that has made my position a little clearer

 

[inertia]

I see your logic.

If we had a site with a very weak link profile (all off topic links) then i can see an irrelevant link from a trusted site might confuse the search engines. But IMO, i think in most cases it would take several irrelevant links from several trusted URLs to upset the search engines theme view of a site.

 

[aaliyahlim]

It is best to do both internal and external linking, with this two combined it will be easier to get traffic.