Internal Linking

[Agnafl]

I know that the navigation of any site is important to the visitor first and the robots second. I also see many sites that have very few pages that you can navigate to from the homepage navigation bar. The bulk of the sites pages are accessed from links on other internal pages as opposed to a navigation bar with every page on it. My question is this - my current site has every page in the navigation bar on the left and also has a link to every page in the footer. Does this have any adverse effects on the site? Should I hide most of these pages and link to them internally from other pages? What does everyone else do and why?!

Matt

[RESteve]

Through monitoring the visitor traffic to my site, I find that the number one place they go to is the listing search. This is why I have this feature so prominent on my site.

I think it really boils down to having a landing home page with a high conversion ratio. Since we all have a good idea of why visitors come to our sites, design for the consumer first. Give them what they want. To drive the spiders to your internal pages, I wouldn't rely so much in having EVERYTHING on the front page like a huge directory.

Rather, create a sitemap, host one on your site for visitors to find, and submit one to google webmaster tools. Your internal pages should be found then.

[JennSellsFast]

I think the obvious way to get spiders to hit your internal pages is to send links to them from other sites. Instead of sending every link to your home page, spread the love to even the deepest pages of your site. That also helps pull them out of supplemental results. It worked for me anyway.

[Agnafl]

Steve/Mike - Thanks for the response. I have just started to link back to internal pages so I imagine it will take some time to build up the link juice. The sitemap is one thing that I am having a problem with. Myers.com (template site provider) does not allow me to upload xml code. I could put it in an html or text format but I am not sure if it will work as well. Any thoughts? I will also have to get myers to put the sitemap in the directory for me as I do not have access to it. They have been really cooperative at doing things like this for me. The only other outstanding question would be this, should I scale back the navigation bar and the footer links so they don't include every page or should I just leave it. Currently the nav bar and footer is the same on every page so all pages link back to each other twice plus whatever internal linking I do. If this is at all unclear please take a look at the site - www.anniemaloney.com

[RESteve]

What about a compressed XML? (filename.xml.gz)

[brandonre]

I think the obvious way to get spiders to hit your internal pages is to send links to them from other sites. Instead of sending every link to your home page, spread the love to even the deepest pages of your site. That also helps pull them out of supplemental results. It worked for me anyway.

Hey Mike how many links on average do have going to your internal pages? , I noticed you have high page rank on most of your internal pages also. I have PR 3 on my index but just revamped my site and added a lot of new pages which have low pagerank.

[JennSellsFast]

I would say on average I have between 50-100 per page. They all differ of course, but I realized that the more links you can shoot to the internal pages, the better your site ranks. Write some blogs and articles about your new pages, and in a few months they will start gaining stregnth.

[Ryan Ward]

Try adding some of your internal pages to directories. When you write blogs about specific areas, post links to the relevant page instead of the homepage. My site is has about equal (toolbar) PR across the entire site that has been online since the last update.

[JennSellsFast]

Equal PR through an entire site is impressive. I guess thats everyone's goal in the long run. Nice job Ryan.

[kensmith]

Equal PR through an entire site is impressive. I guess thats everyone's goal in the long run.

It shouldn't be your goal unless every page in your site has equal value. Equal lead generation value that is. Send the pages that you want to rank the most PR.

As for the navigation you want to send the visitors to the pages that will convert to leads. Many pages in an average real estate site are just supporting pages and should not be on the homepage navigation.