How interlinking of pages in a website affects ranking

[birendra]

About five months before we modified our website structure and left some pages unlinked with any other page in the website, means these pages are not reachable from any page of this website.

Now I am finding that these unlinked pages are ranking on the first page of yahoo and second page in Google for very competitive keywords.

I am thinking, Google and Yahoo gives more value to a page which has less linking in the website. Search Engine thinks that these types of page are low reachable to the visitors visiting on the site so SE gives more value for ranking and makes them reachable in SERPs.

Please share with me if any one is also observed this effect.

Thanks

[tedster]

Hello birendra, and welcome to the forums.

I haven't seen any effect like this, and I'm glad you reported it - it is very unusual. In most cases an "orphan" page that has no links from other pages on the site will have a lot of trouble ranking at all.

Do these pages of yours have strong backlinks from other websites?

[birendra]

This page has 23 links on the other websites and all these pages where this is linked are very deep in the directory structure.

About one year before, one of my friend suggested me that Google give preference to the pages which are not linked to all pages in the website, I do not know from where he got that information but he is follower of Matt Cutts.

[tedster]

I have seen a mirror effect to yours. Pages with few links pointing out, INTO the rest of the site often seem to do well. This might be a framed page, for instance. But such a page still wouldn't be a complete orphan - it has some incoming links

I've always assumed that the absence of a lot of internal anchor text helps keep the relevance signals very clear.

[serenoo]

in this video [youtube.com...] Matt Cutts says it is better to have the links one click far from home page.

[birendra]

I also follow the rule of one click to reach any page from the home page.

I am checking the ranking on Google Japan and Yahoo Japan, my website is in Japanese Language and not using any frame.

[NewDelhiSEO]

About five months before we modified our website structure and left some pages unlinked with any other page in the website, means these pages are not reachable from any page of this website.

What about other pages of the WWW. You say "this website". Thats not the only linking parameter.

I am thinking, Google and Yahoo gives more value to a page which has less linking in the website. Search Engine thinks that these types of page are low reachable to the visitors visiting on the site so SE gives more value for ranking and makes them reachable in SERPs.

No one will agree with this. Google was started with the idea that a link to a page is a vote validating its usefulness in the www. That is till date the heaviest factor behind ranking a page for a particular word. I am dead sure Bing follows this to a very large extent though some say for Microsoft Bing on page factors are more important. I dont have proofs for that and Bing does not confirm that.

If we had the url of the page in question we could be able to do some further digging into this. Right now without further proofs and research this claim remains unfounded.

[NewDelhiSEO]

sorry I missed the second update.

Thats the answer then. It has 23 backlinks from other pages on the www.
There is nothing wrong in linking to your own pages. If you dont recommend your own page why should others?

Only reason where the links to inner pages are discounted are sitewide links. That is when a link or a group of links appear throughout the site. Such links dont get much attention from bots for passing PR or serp benefits.

Same holds to for duplicate text blocks. If you have a particular block of text with one or two links being used on multiple pages on the website then those links will remain discounted.

Does this address you concern any better?

[piatkow]

This whole thread reminds me of what has happened to a site that I used to run for a community organisation where I used to live.

The new "webmaster" moved the site to a different host and then just gave up. Fifteen months down the line, after complaints that the site was out of date he deleted the home page. I feel quite smug when I see the inner pages still turning up in the top three positions for key search arguments. The only way to take a page off line is to delete it.

[John_Lee]

hey birendra are you from Nepal...?
and yes this thing has happen to one of my blog...The pages that are not internally linked are quite good in the SERPs...hmmm sth fishy aaye..:D

[graywolf]

Sometimes old pages still exist but lose all internal links during a redesign, if the external links are strong enough pages can still rank

[yaix2]

@birendra
Do these pages still link to other pages within your site? Or are they completely disconnected, i.e. no linking both ways?

[birendra]

This page is not linked with any page within the website(means completely disconnected), but the xml sitemap contains the url for this page.

This page has complete link structure(navigation links) same as other pages within the website have.

@graywolf
Other pages within the website also have external links and all pages including this page have same Meta title creation rule(approx equal keyword occurrence in content, and image alt tag), the title of all pages contain three keywords first and then some words about the page means the ranking keyword is used in most of all pages in the website.

For the said keyword, home page of the website is on 1st position in yahoo japan, this page is on 4th position, and no other page of the website is in top 100 search results.

This page is also ranking in Google Japan for other keyword in top 20 search results.

[serenoo]

If all pages link to all pages ... is this a seo google mistake?

[steveb]

It's perfectly plausible that Google gives a boost to pages that have an extraordinary ratio of external links to internal links (in this case that would be infinity).

[birendra]

@steveb
Your analysis is useful information to understand this ranking effect.

[Mark_A]

There is a page in the top ten on G for a two word key term I am interested in. I have not found a page on that site that links to this page and the key term is not repeated anywhere else in the site. The page has the key term in its title but apart from that it does not appear on what is a clean simple page.

How that page ranks, is beyond me!

[piatkow]

How that page ranks, is beyond me!

Deep linked or XML site map - easy. See my earlier post about the site that still ranks No.1 despite the home page being deleted.

[Mark_A]

Aha piatkow. I think I will have to learn how to create xml site maps!