Internal Link structure to rank high on country specific serps

[bicycling]

40,000 pages
New category structure

Hi, i have a few questions with regards to ranking high for my site especially in Google Country Specific:
My main concern would be the timeframe involved to rank high for many rather competitive b2b 2 keyword phrases.
my competitor is riding high on first page due to their early work on SEO a few years back.
This is my challenge to at least match them.

Problem is we have only a 4 months back rewrote nearly 40,000 urls.
But the category link structure was still not internally linked accordingly.

From my experience a good internal link structure would definitely help in ranking high for certain keyword phrases, though backlinks maybe at a minimal.
Since we have 40,000 urls for my entire site having a good crosslinking back internally would surely boost my ranking especially in google.
But how long do you reckon from ymy experience.

While my competitors many category pages have a Pagerank of 1 or 2, mys my zero.
Though pagerank updates nearly every 4 months but it's not the main factor to rank high.
my competitors doesn't have external backlinks to those pages but all are internally linked.

Though other factors come into play for ranking high,

but my main question would be, If i get the internal link structure spot on & the new rewrite of the category url's
example:
example.com/categoryA/
example.com/categoryB/
How long would it take to rank high in google, having said that my site is huge with more then 40,000 plus urls
From whatever experience i've got, i reckon that it would take at least 4 months or more for google to update their database & see some changes.

Hope for your insights on the timeframe,
I remember reading one post lately about him rewriting his category structure. Wonder how his site is fairing on organic search..thanks

[Robert Charlton]

While my competitors many category pages have a Pagerank of 1 or 2, mys my zero.

It's very possible that Toolbar Bar PageRank hasn't caught up with your new pages and category structure. In any event, I wouldn't restructure a site based on what I see in the Google toolbar. Also, PageRank isn't necessarily an indicator of ability to rank.

And, regarding the timeframe, I haven't polished my crystal ball recently, and it's a little foggy during this time of major algo changes in Google.

All that said, you are right that structure is important. If everything else were equal, and TBPR were accurate, and I was comparing the structure of two sites with content of identical quality with equivalent inbound links going into their home pages, one of things I'd look at to answer your question about category page PageRank is how many category pages there are.

If your competitor is dividing inbound PageRank among, say, 40 links from home, and you are dividing it among, say, 400, then each of your pages would get 1/10th the PageRank that your competitor's pages are getting. (For the time being, I'm ignoring the Reasonable Surfer model, etc, so this is an oversimplification).

Again, this is about PageRank distribution only... it's not about how much this PageRank will help you rank, or when. There are too many other variables.

[bicycling]

Hi Robert, thanks for the input.Correct indeed, there are just too many variables to get right up there.Though getting the internal link structure is just the foundation as i read too many big sites just doesn't bother about that.Until they need SEO. And as for the SE's nobody can gurantee a timeframe,just have to work at it. Thank you very much.

[Robert Charlton]

bicycling - Take a look at this discussion. It might be helpful to get you thinking....

For Mega-Site SEO, Structure is King - not Content
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4238574.htm [webmasterworld.com]

This discussion, while primarily about ultra-large sites, would apply to your site as well. 40,000 pages is not a small site. You might even want to consider carefully whether you have the link juice and unique content necessary to support that many pages.

[bicycling]

Hi Robert, thank you very much for the reference. Looks like the article i am looking for. Really appreciate it. Hoping for all the best, what i worry would be the link juice.