Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Disregarding for the moment the presence of any external outbound links from the homepage, what do you think is the optimal number of internal links (aka links pointing to internal pages on the same domain) that should be present on the homepage?
Obviously I would assume the SEO axiom would hold that the less links present on a given page, the more value given to each link, and vice versa. That said, if I have hundreds (if not thousands) of internal subpages that I would like to have rank for their respective keywords, I need to get each of them some backlinks. In this respect, it would make sense to link to all of them (theoretically) from my homepage.
But this would effectively transform my homepage into a sitemap, and the large number of links on my homepage would serve to devalue each of those links. So I think it makes more sense to be picky about which subpages I would really like to rank well and then just link to those 20-30 from my homepage so they get good link value.
Do you think 20-30 is a reasonable number?
Total internal links is one of the [many] issues that makes me not like dhtml menu systems. If you have a main menu level of 7 choices, and on average each of those 7 entries has 5 sub-menus and then 4 third level sub-sub-menus, you've already got 140 internal links - and that's just from the menu system, before you even put anything at all into the page's main content block.
To me, this is like throwing a huge pile of garbage at both the end user and the algorithm. Such "linking" makes every page seem as important as every other page, and that just makes the algo's job that much more difficult.
[edited by: tedster at 9:40 pm (utc) on Oct. 3, 2007]
I.e., some internal page "X" will obviously have a link from the domain's sitemap, and possibly the homepage, but if I have a group of 30 or 40 related sub-pages, is it wise to include a table filled with links to each of them on every page of my entire domain?
