Deep Linking Ratio

A factor you consider

[graywolf]

I recently found an online tool that determines the percentage of your links that go to pages other than your home page using Yahoo. While this is an interesting stastistic, I'm not sure it accounts for anything. Is this something anybody looks at or considers?

[caveman]

I've never looked at ratios, but to the extent that this serves as a reminder to seek out quality deeplinks to your sites, then I suppose it's a good thing. Certainly, our sites that receive a greater number of quality deeplinks tend to be the sites that perform better overall. But there are many related factors: sites that get more quality deeplinks tend to be higher quality sites overall, so they tend to perform better on all sorts of fronts.

[Vegas21]

I consider this quite a bit. In terms of having an inbound link structure that appears "natural", I try to ensure that a site has at least 10% of links pointing somewhere deep in the site (e.g. non-homepage). I think a site that has 100s of inbound links that all point to the homepage doesn't look natural and could be at risk of tripping a filter.

I think the inbound link structure of a true authority site has a good percentage of links pointing to internal pages (such as articles). Think of how many links CNN.com gets to internal pages.

[georgeek]

graywolf I don't use it directly but the UK based text link broker we use swears by it. He says that PR is irrelevant when you buy text links in quantity and that the deep link ratio is much more important. Who knows but it sure seems to work for him and us!

[graywolf]

I have some stuff as much as 80% deep linked others as little as 10%. Hard for me to come to a conclusion if it's a factor with the google-lag/box throwing a monkey wrench in the works.

[caveman]

Gee, I guess we better get to work on our deep links ... most of our sites have 20% or less going to internal pages. :¦

[neuron]

I think it's more of a keyterm coverage issue than a rule-of-thumb measurement.

If I have a site that's 10 pages, with one targeted keyterm per page, then I can link to all those pages from the home page of the site using those keyterms. Thus, I can have all my incoming links pointed to the home page where all those keyterms are linked from.

However, if I have a 500 page site, with each page targeting one keyterm per page, I cannot link to all those pages from the home page. I will need to chop my site up into categorical or relevent sections, and I'd end up with maybe 20 different keyterms per category, with each one of those category pages linking to the target pages. I then need to direct those incoming links with the relevant keyterm to the right category page where there will also be a link with the same keyterm pointing to another internal page, so I would need incoming deep links to 25 pages or so, plus links to the home page.

My personal preference is to have 1/3 or less of total links pointing to the home page, and the rest distrubted internally according to the competitiveness of the term. However, I almost always end up with more links to the home page than to internal pages. Even if you asked for all links to point to deep pages, you'd still end up with a potfull of links to the homepage itself. So, the correct strategy may be to seek all deep-links and accept whatever you get. Then it would be easy to get whatever else you needed direct to the home page.

[graywolf]

So, the correct strategy may be to seek all deep-links and accept whatever you get. Then it would be easy to get whatever else you needed direct to the home page.

That was my strategy for the site with 80% deep links.

[zammo]

And what's the name / web address of this tool out of interest?

[georgeek]

zammo

And what's the name / web address of this tool out of interest?

Deep Link Ratio [text-link-ads.co.uk].