Google SEO Tip: Controlling Your Links
It is the old story, “How do I get more traffic to my site?“ If you run a blog, that is good. It seems like you have one foot already in the door towards getting your articles indexed and having them displayed on the Google Search Engine Results page (GSERP). Blogs, such as Wordpress, seem to be natural Google Bot magnets. This articles teaches you how to control your links and why it is important for improved SEO.
On my site I write a lot about successful blogging and different ways to better optimize your blog site. In this article you will learn about controlling your links. Controlling the pages you link to on your site is important because the Google Bot will investigate where all your links go to, and then where all the links on those pages go to, and so forth. The Google Bot is dedicated to investigating deep links and keeps a tally on which pages have content that is acceptable for the Google Index and which pages do not. If you are participating in link exchanges or blogroll exchanges, that is great! Participating in these exchanges will help increase your backlinks. However, if you carelessly participate in these exchanges and don’t invest time into investigating the links on the page you linked to, then you it could potentially cause your site some harm.
Another aspect to look at when controlling your links is clearing a path or painting a navigational picture specific for directing the Google Bot. If you control your links you can actual point the Google Bot in the directions you want it to go. Your home page is ultimately the most important page on your site. If you have ten most recent articles displayed on your home page and 250 other external links, when the Google Bot visits your site, it will be hit/miss whether the Google Bot indexes your articles. “It is important to have your home page indexed, but what is more important is having your individual pages indexed as well”. If the Google Bot can’t reach your important article pages because it was too busy attempting to index 250 other links, then you lose!
Your home page needs to be organized, clean, and Micro-managed. If you don’t manage and have a conscious knowledge of your links on your homepage, then inadvertently you make it difficult for you to be a successful blogger because you put a huge damper on how accurately your important articles get indexed.
Basically, what I am saying is don’t have a million external links on your home page, and don’t have a million internal links on your home page either! The total amount of links on your home page *should not exceed 100 URLS. If you have a blogroll with 50 sites, you might want to consider creating a page called “blogroll” or “links page” and putting the links there. Doing that reduces your home pages links from 50 down to 1. It is no big deal for people to click into a secondary page to view links.
As as added bonus, when you consolidate your links into secondary pages, you also help increase the PageRank of these pages. If you increase your PageRank on secondary pages that link back to your home page, then you will really start to see your home page increase in PageRank.
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[...] Google SEO Tip: Controlling Your Links [...]
Here is an article that I found tracking back to this one… it is actually a great read!
(not sure why it didn’t automatically trackback to here)
Check out this article:
Blogrolls – Long or Short?
[...] Interested in getting the best bang for your buck? Do you want to have a search engine optimized (SEO) home page. Optimizing your home page for Google and other popular search engines is not hard to do. The first step towards optimizing your home page is realizing that less is more. There are many reasons why this is important. Having less on your home page is the first step towards search engine optimization. Lets learn why. Less is more… You should have no more than 100 links on your home page. This includes both links to your own pages and current page as well links to other sites and their pages. Do Not Exceed 100 URLs Per Page (Especially your home page). Why? [...]
[...] Control who and where you link to. Investigate the page(s) you want to link to. Explore where the links go on the page you want to link to. If you create a post about snowboarding, and link to a site titled, “snowboarding made easy” and within that site they link to another site titled, “snowboard manufacturing tips”, and that page links to a porn site… your site’s SEO will suffer because of that. You have got to be careful with who and where your site links to. Control your external links out. Also you should not have anymore than 100 links (internal and external) per page. Over 100 links per page makes indexing difficult. Having more than 100 links per page can become difficult for you to personally manage as well. For best SEO limit your links to a maximum of 100 urls per page. [...]
[...] There are still people out there that can’t enjoy high speed Internet. I never want to leave that viewing audience out. Once a dial up users finds a fast loading site, they tend to bookmark/save to favorites more frequently than someone on high speed. Dial up users tend to value sites that load fast more than high speed Internet users. If you exclude dial up users in your considerations on designing your site, you are missing out on an array of dedicated and committed daily viewers that could potentially be visiting your site on a regular basis and contributing to your articles and posts. I also believe that Google keeps an eye on this as well. Reducing your load time and keeping your external links to a maximum of 100 per page will also help improve your Google SEO. [...]
[...] your home page is bombarded with tons of links, not only is that confusing for yourself, your viewers, but also it is confusing for the Google [...]
[...] for Google that illustrates what you and your site are all about. Earlier I wrote an article about Controlling Your Links, which teaches you good foundational skills in controlling internal and external content you link [...]
Having more than 100 internal links on your homepage will not harm you. Google put that rule up when they were only spidering up to 100K. It’s not that way anymore. However it is good practice to have many more internal links than external links. And I will say that having more than 100 internal links on your homepage might have usability concerns unless they are presented correctly.
Catfish,
This post is over a year old. Check the time stamp and just on over to 2008.
Great post! I would like to point out to your users that if you want free traffic, just start stumbling your own content and the visitors will rolling in!
I liked the idea of having a blogroll on the secondary page.It seems the logical thing to do.
Though,I am a total newbie to bloggie(4 months at the most),i have been following many seo tips on your site.
I understand the results will not be easy to come by,but i had a question.
Does having a blog roll helps.
I mean i put up links to other sites but what if they don’t do the same.Is it still going to help me
Check out Ankit’s last blog post..My Bucket-List is Ready?Is yours too
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