Internal Linking

[Ryan Ward]

Can't find much about this question so I'll pose it here.

Does increasing links to internal pages have any (direct or indirect) association with increasing SERPS for your homepage. I assume that if your internal pages are linking to your homepage and they are increasing in their ranks, that this will help to increase the homepage rank, but, I'm not sure.

[Sam Dodd]

I say yes, others say no. Only google really knows.

[Ryan Ward]

That is what I get from most people. Either way, internal deep links help.

What I don't get is how someone can just say no.

It stills seems like it is a page that links to your homepage and if you increase that pages value then it will be providing more link juice to your homepage than it used to.

or

Google sees it as internal and devalues it - which doesn't make any sense to me as to why they would.

[Sam Dodd]

Ryan,

I completely agree, at the very least you are increasing the inner pages PR (assuming its a quality link). Then that inner page with now higher (even if only slightly) PR links to your homepage and passes a little more link juice then before the inner link.

I would say that is the logical anwser but like I said before, Only google really knows. I think that is a very educated guess though.

[Smuck]

For what it is worth, I posted an article somewhere on the forum whereby the position of the writer is that deep linking of internal pages helps prevent supplemental results.

[Ryan Ward]

Yes that definately makes since because G will see the pages as more relevant with incoming links. I am just wondering if higher ranking internal pages will help contribute to a higher ranking homepage. Some people say no and I just can't understand why they wouldn't.

[Smuck]

Actually, now that I have thought about it a bit more, linking to internal pages DEFINATELY helps in search engine positioning as the search engines look at a website with links pointing ONLY to the home page as unnatural. I did a quick search and found this article, although there are probably better ones that support this principle.

[kensmith]

Ryan yes it does have a direct link to increasing the homepage SERP's. Think of it this way, you have an extra vote for your website.

Besides it is much easier to rank your internal pages for multiple terms then just he homepage. If you have multiple cities you target you will need to have inner pages that can rank. Your homepage can only cover so many terms.

[VRI]

Gotta agree with that Ken... there's not much talk of pr these days but no matter what you call it (link juice, link mojo, reputation, etc.) it can come into your system from any page and it strengthens the system similarly.

Every page that your page links to internally will get a little extra of that reputation, the individual page will start to rank higher and as Smuck said it can help to avoid supplementals or improve the overall crawl.

[Sam Dodd]

After I got to #1 position for my 3 main terms I started focusing on ranking some inner pages. It has seemed to help not only those inner pages to rank but also seems to help my main page. I say any (quality) link pointing to any part of your site is a quality link.