External links to our site

Do internal links reduce effectiveness?

[webboy1]

I have been looking at the links to our website using Googles 'link:www.yoursite.com' feature.

We have 113 links to our URL, but only 38 are external. The rest are from 'home' links within the site. All of these links link to index.htm, but i guess that google assumes that www.yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com/index.htm are the same thing.

So my question is this. Does having more internal links than external to your domain negativley effect the effectiveness of External links? A bit of a mouth-full, i know.

Im just trying to work out reasons why our ranking is so low, and after a lot of reasearch, it seems to boil down to the lack of external links.

Webboy

[ciml]

> that www.yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com/index.htm are the same thing

Google merge them now, even if the URLs don't return identical content.

> So my question is this. Does having more internal links than external to your domain negativley effect the effectiveness of External links? A bit of a mouth-full, i know.

I would say no. Nothing I've conducted has indicated any negative impact on the rankings of a page by adding extra internal links.

I don't know if SafeSearch could be tripped by linking to your home page with adult words, but even if that's the case it seems unlikely that it would ever be a problem.

[IanTurner]

I also believe that having more internal links than external doesn't adversely affect your site.

In fact with Google indicating that larger sites are better than smaller ones the more internal links you have the better it may be.

[webboy1]

Thats actually a good point ianturner. I hadn't thought of it that way.

[ThomasB]

Too many internal links (well, keep the 100 links/page suggestion in mind) shouldn't be a problem. Whereas I saw that too many external links could hurt.