Inbound Links to one or more pages.

Which is better?

[twilight47]

Is it better to have all inbound links pointing to the same page (ie. index page) or would it be better to share the wealth so to speak and have links point to several different pages?

In other words, would these outside links to other internal pages give better overall site ranking or would propping up the index page and passing on pagerank that way be more beneficial?

Also, is there a point of diminished returns in having more and more links pointed to one page?

I haven't found this info yet. Any opinions are appreciated

[berli]

I think the first thing to consider, setting aside Google's current algo bugs/changes, is whether it's good for you for visitors to come in on any page, or through your home page.

For example, if you have a wide variety of content on your site, it's probably better for visitors to come in on subpages (treating topics they're highly interested in) than to your homepage (where they may not see anything they like in a few seconds and thus leave).

For the converse case, I can't offhand think of a situation where you really *don't* want people to come into subpages that aren't members only/password protected. (Excepting where you've created orphan pages that outside sites are now linking into -- I would expect any perky webmaster to fix that as a matter of course.) I did robots.txt a small part of my site that should be read in sequence (and probably *should* be implemented using scripting, but I was being lazy -- it's just a toy, a quiz, if you're wondering).

Just an aside:
If you have frames, and have designed your site poorly, you may be both *forcing* offsite webmasters to deeplink (few of us will offer a link to a homepage with instructions "click A, then B in the window, then C, then D...") and visitors who come in on the deeplink will never see any other page on your site (unless they edit the url themselves--rare). One more reason to say no to frames, or implement them *properly* (also rare) if you must use them.

If you have a large online catalog of products, it's usually better for people to link into your home page, *unless* you have unique content, in which case the casual viewer will be sold by your content (articles, product comparisons, useful web widget) and then find their way to the sales part. However, you want to make your entire catalog of products available to SE robots because some people are going to search the web for a particular product (to check availability or prices).

That's my 2c. As for PR (not the only factor in SERPS, after all), it really depends on Google, your internal linking structure, and whether you offend webmasters who want to deeplink!

Maybe some of the masters here can expound on the zen of inbound links? <g>

[dazz]

I think that it is best for most links to point to your index page and as long as you have a good site structure the PR from your homepage will spread around to your internal pages.

It would certainly not do you any harm to have inbound links to your internal pages either though!