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That got me thinking about what internal link strategies might get you banned. Our main site is growing about 100 pages a week (with real additional content) and I am woried that if there is some feature common to the whole site (e.g. the home page or some other focal point like a currency converter or FAQ), and there are links to it from nearly every page, google may see it as an attempt to boost pagerank.
Have you been banned for internal linking on a single site? If so, what do you think you did wrong?
What internal linkages are ok, and what are not? So far as I know Google doesn't give any guidance on this one, but I'm sure they wield the penalty sword just the same.
Internal linking just provides good navigation for your users. Linking to the home page and main section indexes on every page may be a good practice in most cases. I cant see why Google would penalise this.
- at every page of your site you provide a link to the top directories of your site to reach a good usability - the main navigation.
- at the deeper pages, say at the direcory index pages, you provide subnavigation links to the deeper sections of the directory - staying in context.
- you also crosslink between deeper pages if they are around a similar theme.
- and so on ...
The Pyramide Theory would mean a 100% penalizing risc if google or any other se would penalize for ("proper, honest") internal linking. I just can't believe this because the Pyramide Theory is a great usability concept first!
The only risc i'm afraid of is internal linking between subdomains. I run a specialized directory that is divided into 3 main subdirectories running seperated on 3 different servers and subdomains. Since they are geneally related i have a link to each subdomain on every page of all the 3 subportals. I don't feel 100% safe but since it's "honestly" for usability reasons i would always argue that it's ok! And until now i'm doing fine ... ;)
But since alltheweb seems to treat subdomains like "i-think-it's-spam" i never had success there. I know, subdomains are used intensively by a lot of spammers. But i just have to run my site at different servers since it's to huge for one single server ... and the only way to do this is via subdomains. So i stay with my subdomains and "ignore the basket alltheweb". And i never had a problem submitting all 3 subdomains to dmoz and other directories cause they aren't artificial - they are really 3 seperated sites dealing with the same top topic but with different sub topics.
But back on topic - i don't see a problem with internal linking unless you don't have hundreds of internal links on every page. Just don't do it to artificially increase PR - do it for a good usability and not for PR. Then PR will come automatically. And BTW: i would never waste my time with PR maths ... ;)
The reason I am worried is because we are building our site in dozens of languages. Each language is effectively "a theme", or segregated from the rest of the site. But there will always be common resources on the site used by all language versions.
Now it isn't such a great problem because when you select a language, you are always taken to the main home page for that language. But in the future, when we build the site to be more smart, you may be taken directly to the page which is the foreign language equivalent of the page you come from. This will mean hundreds of internal links going all over the site with no apparent theme. It might look like a mess to Google even though it would actually be nice for the user.
Say you'll have a french flag or a link "French Version" on every single page. You either hold a url database or, depending on your site's structure, you have a directory "/french/" with all the french pages. Or you have a database driven site with a language table, or subdomains or whatever. Just make the "French" link a script link like "mydomain.com/translate?lang=french&page=/thisproduct.htm". Now when someone clicks on the link, just do a redirect to the translated page. Then make a entry within your robots.txt to disallow "/translate" and you'll be 100% safe! ;)
