How to get high ranking for inner pages?

[crick]

A lot of people put a lot of effort into ranking their home pages by getting related PR backlinks and doing some optimisation for the domain. But, how do get your inner pages to rank? Is it a process of whereby if your home page has a very good PR and ranks very well then your inner pages should follow suit, as long as they are well linked to home page.

[tedster]

The PR equation is the same for any page. If an internal page gathers lots of links from other high PR pages anywhere on any website) then its PR can grow, even beyond the PR of the home page. The url of the page in no way enters into PR calculation.

Intelligent linking throughout a website has the effect of distributing, circulating, voting the PR that normally accumulates on the home page to the internal pages. But any links from anywhere on the web will help to spread PR.

The natural impulse to keep click paths to all pages short also tends to optimize PR distribution.

[treeline]

Get some nice, juicy, on topic links to those interior pages. Makes all the difference in boosting them up.

There's certainly ranking filtering down from the home page, but a few outside links can really help those inside pages.

[Pico_Train]

Yup, extra links to those internal pages certainly won't hurt. Good links with good specific anchor text and you are on your way.

[tigger]

also I'm sure you have it in place but a site map could help the inner pages ranked - although don't rely on G to crawl them - but I'm not going to hijack your thread

[glengara]

A good site architecture is invaluable for this, half a dozen internal links that use the proper anchor text can do wonders, my personal favourite is the theme pyramid....

[crick]

Do you mean a normal sitemap or A Google sitemap?

[tigger]

normal site map very unimpressed with G site maps

[Liane]

very unimpressed with G site maps

Me too tigger! Don't understand what all the fuss is about. But a good sitemap is worth its weight in gold.

[ronburk]

There's a recent interview with Dan Thies of SEO Research Labs (google: spotlight "Dan Thies") where one of the best hidden gems is his comment on how websites fail to "leverage the power of their own internal links".

His example is the classic case of the shopping site, where the usual mindless hierarchical structure leaves the all-important product page hanging out there with perhaps a single internal link pointing to it.

Hopefully, people will continue to overlook this point. It's one of the best competitive tools a white hat content developer has at the moment, IMO.

Fortunately, it seems like the vast majority of webmasters just cannot grasp that googlebot sees your website as a directed graph, as specified by your internal links, and doesn't care a bit about your "directory structure". I predict most of them will continue to force content into a simple hierarchy and fail to use link density to provide ranking boosts that internal pages often need. And the myth that you should put everything in the "root" directory will probably still be alive and well 10 years from now :-).

[egurr]

Be careful what you wish for, but...
To get higher rankings for inner pages write exceptional content and then throw it out to the article directories with the link back to the designated page. I did this on a three month old site. One of the articles was really good. I posted it on ezine and it got picked up by ten or so other sites. Two of them put the entire article on PR4 pages and it's been there almost as long as the site has been up. Of the others that picked it up only one had it on a PR0. Now I've got this one page with high PR and the rest of the site (280 pages) are PR2,1 or 0.
I should've pointed the link to the index I guess.
Anyway, now when I post an article these same sites usually pick it up and give it a decent run.

[Lorel]

I set up a new page about every other week. they are practically all tutorials or FAQs or other straight info pages. When I do this I cross link with other related pages on my site. The last time I did this both new pages got a PR 6 within a few weeks of being online and my home page is only PR 5. I didn't seek any links for them either--although there are sites linking to them now.

[ronburk]

The last time I did this both new pages got a PR 6 within a few weeks of being online and my home page is only PR 5.

Note that this particular phenomenon is neatly explained by the theory that says green-bar PR is uptodate for new pages, but not for older pages (which is to say, when things are updated, your home page PR will suddenly be revealed to not be lower than your "new" pages after all).