How internal linking works

[member22]

I am trying to understand the way internal linking should be done and I am getting mixed signals as I look at websites that rank 1 st 2 nd on google for various search terms.

Form what I undersand internal linking needs to stay within the site and never go out...
I see sites that rank first and that have links of other websites on their pages... ( to me it is wrong because the " power " goes away ) is that right ?

Then from what I understand the goal is to have the "power " flow around the site if you want each page to have the same " power " orgo from the home page then to the subpages and then back to the homepage if the homepage is the page you want to rank highly on a search term.

I see a site that ranks 1 st just by having power given to the sub pages from the homepage but the power never comes back to the homepage... How can this site rank so high ?

I am really getting confused how it all works could anyone help ?

[BradleyT]

Form what I undersand internal linking needs to stay within the site and never go out...

That by definition is internal linking. Internal linking simply refers to a page linking to another page on the same website. You can link to other websites all you want - those are not internal links.

[martinibuster]

is that right ?

The SERPs are telling you it's not right. Go with what the SERPs tell you.

In one of your previous posts I listed things that affect the power of backlinks. I suggest reviewing that list for an idea of what can be negatively affecting the power of your backlinks. Additionally, review the backlinks of your backlinks. A few factors (among many other factors) to check for: must be relevant to your site, not depend on blog commenting, not be linked to SEO sites in any way (unless your site IS an seo site). Any lapses will cause the link to pass deprecated pr to the point where the link is more or less worthless.

[eric1981]

yes you should review your previous post.

and to your concern regarding out-going links, don't be afraid to give links to good sites, because google doesn't punish that. however you must pay attention to irrelevant and spam/#*$! sites and the like...

[tedster]

There are two very different facets to internal linking. The first is actually Information Architecture or "IA" - and this is where so many sites of all sizes fall apart. The entire subject is barely known, despite being a discipline that even predates the web.

For resources, there's a great O'Reilly book about Information Architecture (now in its 3rd edition) and three good threads in our HTML Forum:

Information Architecture for the Small Site - 1 [webmasterworld.com]
Information Architecture for the Small Site - 2 [webmasterworld.com]
Putting Information Architecture into Practice [webmasterworld.com]

If your site has a good Information Architecture, it will have a good menu (that's internal linking). The problem is that Google created "link mania" over the past decade and people are sometimes thinking about SEO more than their actual visitors.

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The second facet of internal linking is also visitor-centric: placing links in the content area of specific pages to help visitors find related information. If you don't care about visitors finding a page, then you shouldn't care about Google indexing it either. In fact, you probably shouldn't be publishing it, eh? So make sure visitors can find pages, cleanly and clearly, and monitored your logs and analytics to see where the squeaky spots are.

No, I'm not drunk on Google Kool-Aid. Success really is about building your websites for visitors, first and foremost. Effective internal linking follows quite naturally from that orientation - and so does search engine success. Yes, there are also some other things you want to keep straight for SEO, but internal linking is all about visitors.