Backlinks to homepage or multiple pages?

[tys0n28]

For the last 10 years, our site focused solely on baseball widgets. We recently added football widgets to our site.

We have 3 pages that could be candidates for backlinks. Our home page (discusses baseball and football widgets), a baseball widget specific page, and a football widget specific page. The homepage has links to each of these pages.

We have a lot of links out there to our homepage from other sites. Some of these 3rd party sites are related to baseball, some of them are related to widgets.

We are now seeking backlinks related to baseball, football, and widgets. Would we be better off pointing all these backlinks to our home page? Or should we point only the widget backlinks to our homepage, while pointing the football backlinks to oursite.com/football.html and change the baseball sites to point to oursite.com/baseball.html ?

Thanks in advance for any advice you can offer.

[tedster]

if you can get backlinks to internal pages, then assuming a decent linking structure in your navigation, the link equity from internal backlinks will circulate throughout your site. Healthy sites usually end up attracting backlinks to some internal pages.

[SanDiegoFreelance]

My preference is deep links to internal content hub pages. 1) Gives me an alternative location other than the home page to promote site content, and I can theme the internal hubs to the specific widget. 2) Makes it a little harder for competitors to see all the links that help me.

I have been thinking my preference is a bit old school and it does not match Bing's SEO recommendations of three links deep from home page (if they only consider one page as a site "home" page). But Bing is not Google and I deal with Bing separately.

[tys0n28]

Thanks for the responses. From a user perspective, I feel the 3 page approach makes more sense as well. I didn't want to do this though if it would hurt our juice though.

[Planet13]

This is more psychology than SEO, but...

I would just kindly suggest that you should ask that the site to link to the most appropriate page on your site; The page that their visitors will find the most helpful.

As a site owner, I would be a lot more receptive to linking to a site if the owner of the site took the trouble to tell me about the page on their site that would best compliment the material on my site.

[chrisains]

I totally agree with @Planet 13.

Deviating away from SEO try to think outside to box a little - think from a users perspective. Which page would be most beneficial for a user? That should be the page which you want to list within search therefore that will be the page to which you should acquire relevant links.

As Planet13 quite rightly said, that would be the page which would potentially be more receptive to natural external links.


Sorry, just thought I'd emphasis the points :-)
Chris