External links versus Internal links

[Onders]

Does anybody have an idea as to how relatively important internal links are to Search Engine ratings? Would it be more beneficial to concentrate on building up external backlinks from related sites or to build more pages on my website and have a good internal cross linking structure? Would be grateful for any input! Thanks

[martinibuster]

Both.

[fom2001uk]

depends how big your site is. If you have hundreds of pages, you don't need to worry as much about external links. Just make sure your internal pages get indexed properly.

[webboy1]

We have been doing quite a bit of research into this recently to try and get a definite answer .... which is proving very hard to do!

However, I would say this: Incoming links are extremely important. Not only to help with some SE rankings, but also simply to help traffic.

The more ways in which spiders can get to your site i.e. through many other sites, the better.

Obviously the more relevant the site that is linking the better.

Google also mentions within its help pages that incoming links are (both in terms of numbers and relevance) one of the most important factors in getting a good ranking in their SE.

We had loads of internal links in one of our sites and we actually deliberatly cut them down a little. This, added with a couple of small changes and sourcing of more incoming links pushed our site around 20 places up the rankings in google.

Anyway, just my thoughts!

[fathom]

martinibuster is suscinct and quite correct.

External links provide (a tons of stuff but) PageRank... today PR has only two enormous values 'crawl depth' and 'frequently of return'.

A large website with few inbound 'quality' links will never get fully indexed thus a small site in this instance has a major advantage... 'no big holes of unarchived pages'.

Thus martinibuster point - if you ignore or delay one (inbound links or internal pages [links]) you are not getting the 'umph' you want.