Google Backward Links and site design

[Jon_King]

Does anyone know why some sites have many of their internal pages listed as Backwards Links in Google while other sites have none?

Is there something in the design? I've examined many sites for structure, link naming and anything else that might lead me to a cause. I can find no reason.

Thanks,
Jon

[Robber]

Probably due to the Page Rank of those internal pages - those above 4 I believe will show up. Your best bet is to browser the Google forum or do a search - I think you'll find few threads on this.

[keyplyr]

It's as simple as.... it's because they link back to the index page with full URL.

Of the 160 pages at my site, 83 show as backward links because they have a PR of 3+ and they link back to the index page. Most of these pages accumulate this PR3+ through external linkage, internal inheritance and cross linking from my other higher PR pages that, in turn, link to them in a relevant, KW text method. Many crawlabble pages that also link back to the index page do not show up as linkage because they either do not have PR or the PR is 2-.

To remove a bit of bloat, I once changed these 'back links to the index page' to relative. The next update, I lost 80+ of the linkage count and a whole point in PR. This loss also seemed to pass on to the other pages, which in turn... (well you get the picture.) Seeing this, I restored the full URLs. The next update the linkage count, and PR, was back up.

[taxpod]

I personally don't think relative vs. absolute URL has anything to do with it. The real answer is whether the linking page has PR at 4 and above.

[gstewart]

This is interesting - is there any downside in using full URL vs relative URL?

[dcheney]

I use relative URLs for all internal links except the banner at the top of each page which is a full link to the home page. The relative URLs are shorter which is my primary reason for using them. The full link is so that if someone downloads the page and later wants to get back to the live site its easy to get there.

FYI, I haven't noticed any effect with using full or relative URLs in the past.

[keyplyr]

I use relative URLs for all internal links except the banner at the top of each page which is a full link to the home page. The relative URLs are shorter which is my primary reason for using them.

I agree and also do this, but it is my logo image (site branding) that links back to the homepage with the absolute (full) URL.

The full link is so that if someone downloads the page and later wants to get back to the live site its easy to get there.

Well, there we disagree. I deliberately make it difficult to pull my site down for local use. External scripts, CSS, and other includes do not follow the site. I do this mainly to stop the leeching and bandwidth thieves, along with those FP, wysiwyg and Office bandits. I also ban the most popular site harvesting tools.

(Back On Topic) About a year ago there was a lengthy thread here discussing relative vs absolute internal links. Several references to using absolute paths and Google linkage count came up, but I didn't take heed because I was concerned with keeping page bloat under control. It wasn't until later when I saw my linkage count drop that I became a believer.

I am not saying that Googlebot will not follow relative internal links, I only saw the significance with pages being counted as linkage using relative vs absolute. Of course this was 6 months ago about the same time Google changed PR requirement for the linking pages, and as with all other things, this may have changed.

[gstewart]

I agree and also do this, but it is my logo image (site branding) that links back to the homepage with the absolute (full) URL

Wouldn't it be better to use a text link with some keywords - eg the site title - rather than linking via an image?

[keyplyr]

I believe the alt="site title" takes care of this, and home-page linked logos are a standard, but yeah KW text links do hold greater significance.