Internal inbound links

to and from hub

[blaize]

I have a question regarding inbound links.

I am wondering what the expected result may be for subdirectory sites which *only* have links to and from my hub. For example:

mywidgetshub.com links to and receives links from:

mywidgetshub.com/red-widgets/
mywidgetshub.com/blue-widgets/

Would I also need to have external inbound links on the subdirectory sites, or would google consider this internal linking structure as being relevant enough to give each site and the hub itself a reasonable page rank?

I am not crosslinking between any of the sites, except links on each to and from the hub. I have related sites on other domains pointing to the hub (i.e., redwidgets-site1.com, bluewidgets-site1.com) which also have external inbound links. I'm not sure if this info is relevant to the question or not...

[ciml]

Welcome to WabmasterWorld, blaize

Linking to and from your subdirectories needn't be a problem, most sites do this. The PageRank of each URL depends on how much PageRank is passed on from other URLs.

Heavy cross linking was common among the sites that had their PR removed in late 2001, but it was cross linking between domains, not subdirectories.

[blaize]

ciml,

Thank you so much for taking the time to respond to my post, and for the warm welcome to this forum!

Does Google give equal weight to links to/from one's own sites (as opposed to those to/from external sites)? Or is it simply dependent upon the PR of each site, regardless of whether the sites are my own or others? Most of my sites are in the same class B range. The reason I ask this is because the subdirectories within my hub only receive links from my own sites.

I am trying to utilize the hub and spoke system rather than interlinking between every site. From what I've read so far, it's my understanding that it's safe to place a link to my hub on multiple domains, and to then list all my domains on my hub (?)

Please forgive me if these questions are repetitive. I did a site search but wasn't able to find clarification on this issue (due to my limited search skills)

[ciml]

Your hub and spoke description matches my view, but we should always be careful about using past penalties to draw conclusions of future penalties.

I believe that PageRank carries equal weight whether the link is to a page on the same domain or not, but that the link text boost is different.

[aspdesigner]

Blaize, while from a content standpoint you may think of these subdirectories as multiple sites, what a search engine is going to see is a single large web site. Multi-domain linkage issues and "link farm" penalties are not really applicable. It is perfectly safe to link between what you call your "spokes", as they are all just internal links to pages all on the same domain. The concerns you expressed are only an issue if you were planning on putting your "spokes" on different domains.

How you structure your site and internal links will effect how you PageRank is "distributed" among the various pages of this site. The hierarchial linking strategy you have described will tend to make your site somewhat "top-heavy", with more of your PageRank being concentrated in the "hub", which would result in better search engine rankings for your "hub" at the expense of reduced rankings for your "spokes".

If you wanted a more "balanced" approach, you could interlink the different sections of this site, which could decrease the PageRank of your hub a bit, but also increase the PageRank and rankings of your spoke pages. This might be preferable if you wanted people to find you on more searches for things that might be found on the spokes. Adding inbound links directly to your spokes would also improve this. It all depends on what you want to do.