Hi I have a page with perhaps 4000 articles links which is paginated as well.
I want to know do I have to link this page to the homepage for SEO purposes? Kindly advise
aakk9999
10:14 am on Mar 22, 2016 (gmt 0)
I am struggling to understand why a page would not link TO home page if it is a part of the site. That is, if a user lands on this page, there should be a way for them to go to home page - and I would presume this would be via main navigation or by clicking on the site logo. So this link should be there for user experience purpose, not for SEO purpose.
But it is also difficult to understand why would you need a page with links to 4000 articles - it is almost as a sitemap of the article part of your site.
tangor
10:36 am on Mar 22, 2016 (gmt 0)
Not saying it still exists, but in the "old daze" link pages/directories were deprecated. These days most try to hold it down to <100 per page.
And yes. If it is a page on your site, it should, either by a page inbetween, link back to the site. Have to ask: Why would you want to deliberately orphan a page?
goodroi
11:22 am on Mar 22, 2016 (gmt 0)
A page with 4000 html links? I'm cringing thinking about the page speed and usability issues. Is this page intended to be a sitemap for the crawlers and not for human consumption?
born2run
11:39 am on Mar 22, 2016 (gmt 0)
Thanks guys the orig post was confusing it's a paginated page with about 10 links per page
aakk9999
5:25 pm on Mar 22, 2016 (gmt 0)
I am still struggling to understand what are you asking.
So there are 4000 / 10 = 400 pages and:
a) You are asking whether the first (or all?) of these pages should link back to home page? b) Or do you mean whether the home page should link to the first in the series of these article listing pages? c) Or do you mean whether the home page should link to all of these article listing pages?
Can you also explain why do you need these pages, are they landing pages at all, do you present these pages to site visitors and when?
born2run
3:43 am on Mar 23, 2016 (gmt 0)
Yeah I meant homepage should link to first page
aakk9999
2:21 pm on Mar 24, 2016 (gmt 0)
Something should link to the first page, otherwise it would be an orphan. Link from home page would give stronger signal about importance of this page, but not so much if the link is in footer/sidebar.
I would think about users - would they find this page useful?
born2run
6:41 am on Mar 25, 2016 (gmt 0)
Thx all I've added a link to the page on the homepage as advised.
JS_Harris
1:34 am on Apr 1, 2016 (gmt 0)
I just wanted to add that if you put any trust into leaked Google rater handbooks then you want an easy way for people to reach the index page. The handbook suggests that the rater check the given page AND take a look at the index page when formulating an opinion. If they can't find your index page you might run into problems.
That being said I don't think it's mandatory, most of my traffic comes in on internal pages and never clicks over to the index page. It depends on what type of site you have. It's one of those things that is probably a really good idea but not as critical as some might expect. I would still retain such a link in case a visitor wants to see the home page.
As long as a page is linked from somewhere, internal or external, it's not a true orphan. Google also doesn't click around, they visit pages directly and so all pages are orphan to Google.
lucy24
2:14 am on Apr 1, 2016 (gmt 0)
most of my traffic comes in on internal pages and never clicks over to the index page
... and even in this day and age, a fair number of users seem to be capable of deleting the last part of the URL, leaving only the hostname, and sending their browser to the resulting page. You can see them in logs when a visit to some deep-interior page is followed by a referer-less request for the front page. (I have no idea what your website is about, but I gather we have one feature in common: it's not a front-driven site. On mine, you'll get to the front page eventually, but only by a sort of inverse-breadcrumb process.)
