Robert_Charlton - 6:48 am on May 21, 2004 (gmt 0)

Google, for some reason, is ignoring all of my internal links.

franklin - Google doesn't show all backlinks. It only shows backlinks that are PageRank 3 or 4 or higher... I forget which it is these days. ;)

If your internal links aren't showing (assuming that they are href html links), it's a pretty good sign that your site, or at least the pages removed from your index page, is suffering from low PageRank. It doesn't mean that Google is ignoring the links, but it may mean that the site doesn't have sufficient inbound linking to rank competitively.

If you're running IE in Windows (which you may not be because of security concerns), use the Google toolbar to get an approximation of your PageRank, and the PageRank of competing pages. It might be worth having IE and the toolbar just for checking PageRank on known safe sites. I run it with Active-X disabled, and so far so good.

I should mention that last night I was checking out the backlinks of a site and Google showed zero backlinks. The site was a PR6, and the same backlink search in Yahoo showed 200 inbounds. I wrote it off to a temporary Google glitch, but if it had been my site, I probably would have looked further.

It sounds, though, like you need some good inbound links... ie, links from on topic, decent PageRank pages with relevant anchor text. Make sure you vary the inbound anchor text enought that it appears to be natural and not manipulative.

The number of links you need depends on the PR of the pages linking to you and the number of outbound links they each have... as well as what the PR of the competing pages is. Anchor text distribution works in tandem with PR. I'd try to get both.