Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I have a site with about 100 pages. I was wondering if it would be a good or bad thing to link each of the pages to every other page. It seems like spiders are not crawling my subpages much. Would this help or could it be considered a form of spam? At the moment, the only link I have to most of the subpages is from the index page.
Thanks,
Rollo
--Illah
One of the fundamental rules of building websites is that you should build them for human visitors and then perhaps give them some small tweaks to make life easier for search engines.
Making a website with 10 pages and letting each of those pages link to all of the others may very well be both quite natural and very user friendly. Doing the same with 100 pages will certainly be neither.
It is rather well known that some search engines have at least some degree of ability to recognise site structure. It would be quite reasonable for search engines to decide an (unknown) upper limit for the acceptable size of a website with such a tight linking structure.
A sitemap is certainly a good thing for both humans and spiders.
1) It gives the spider access to everything right away
2) It distributes or meshes PR evenly throughout the site
I would use visual elements to establish a hierarchy, something like bullets, indents, smaller font size, thin lines, etc. Works for people and for spiders. However a sitemap is something I ALWAYS use.
All points are well taken. Most of the links from the homepage are at the bottom, just out of sight in a pretty organized way. The sight looks very nice, its not an eyesore in any way.
In my case, it's not essential that visitors visit most of the pages, they are mostly there so that people can find the diffenent services in the SERPs then click through to the homage page/services/ pricing/payments/contact,etc.
I've heard that linking every page to every other page like this could be considered spam. Do any of you know if this would be the case?
It sounds like it would help solve my spider problems, but I wouldn't want to do anything that would get me penalized.
Thanks!
Rollo
I like the approach of limited cross-linking based mostly on relevance, then linking to a site map from every page. That shares the PR around without diluting your keyword focus too much.
You raise a good point, it would dilute the keywords somewhat, that's true. Would it provide any SERPs benefit?
I think a site map is a good suggestion under normal circumstances, in my case I really don't want to encourage clients to visit most of the pages because they have 75% similar copy, but with different keywords. They're more designed to be entry points than anything else.
I have a question, as far as internal links go, would a simple inconspicuous drop down menu do the trick the same as a normal text link?
Thanks again…
Rollo
Fully-meshed site "was" one of the most marvelous methods to boost your internal pages in the SERP and it worked amazing well in Google in the past until 2003. In 2004, the boost has obviously been discounted by Google and your internal pages don't soar that high across the board that they used to be.
However, as graywolf suggested - " 1) It gives the spider access to everything right away and 2) it distributes or meshes PR evenly throughout the site" - This is still hold true until this day.
Do you think a drop down menu with all of the pages listed work as well as a text link menu for this purpose?
Rollo
I'm a big fan of simple anchor texts to enhance SE spider crawling the sites. With anchor texts, you'll get both PR distribution and keyword relevancy at the same time.
For drop down menu, I'm "not" its fan as you may get SE spider to crawl and distribute PR, but I have no idea whether it gives any "keyword relevancy" advantage over simple anchor texts.
