Most external links go to internal pages.

Will it improve Google ranking for homepage?

[lakr]

Dear all,

Most of my external links go to internal pages, my questions are:

- Will it improve homepage's ranking and PageRank?
- Will it increase the overall trust rank of the website?

Notes: the external links from About.com, and NYtimes.

I appreciate your reply.

Have nice weekend.

Lkr

[Robert Charlton]

Assuming that you've set up your internal nav to distribute PageRank back to your home page (and/or other key pages of your choosing), links to your internal pages should prove beneficial to your entire site.

I believe Adam Lasnik has stated, though (if memory serves me correctly), that Google passes trust on to other pages of your site "where appropriate." Trying to imagine what he might have meant by this (if he was in fact the person at Google who said it), it may be that if the page that received the link is too far off topic from the rest of your site, trust might be withheld. I've not tested this, so put this in the speculation file.

Also, it's not clear that your links from About.com and The NY Times are direct href links that transmit PageRank. They could be, for example, links that go through cgi redirect pages, in which case you won't see any PageRank benefits.

[europeforvisitors]

I'm not sure how About.com links work in terms of PageRank (since they place pages in frames), but in my experience, NYTimes.com links are plain-vanilla href links. Not only that, but the stories with the links may also turn up on other NY Times Co. sites that are crawled and indexed by Google.

[lakr]

Dear Robert Charlton and Europeforvisitors,

Thank you very much for your help. What do you think this link will be? direct or indirect?

<a href="http://www.mysite.com" onclick="zT(this, '1/XJ')">style="color:black;background-color:#ffff66"> Anchor text</a>

This is what I view the page source.

Best,

Lkr

[Robert Charlton]

Looks like a plain vanilla href link to me, with a javascript click counter that shouldn't affect transmitted link love. Congratulations.

[lakr]

Robert Charlton, I appreciated your help. What do you think about the below link from Standford University? is it any valuable?

http://www.example.edu/?q=links/refer/68example+sample

- this leads to my site.

Best,

Lkr

[tedster]

That's a classic example of a link that might bring you traffic, but it would be little help with Google or other search engines today, because the URL for your site is not there - instead there's a script on the other site's server that processes the link, hidden from the spider.

href="[your-url-here]"...

That's what you're looking for. There can also be other attributes, javascript functions, whatever, in the <a> element, but you want to see the straight href="[your-url]" to be sure that it's giving you backlink power in terms of search engines.

[lakr]

Thank you, Tedster, you are always my great helper, I got what you mean, but I wonder why Google records this link in Google Webmaster Tools, while other indirect links, they did not. This is why I placed the question here.

Best,

Lkr

[tedster]

If that kind of url shows up in GWT, it is definitely curious - I have no answer.