Do inbound links to a home page help the popularity of other pages?

building the popularity of web pages other than the home page

[andrea edwards]

Hello,

I am new to search engine optimisation but I have found webmaster world very helpful so far and I was hoping you might be able to answer this question for me.

I have read that one of the best ways to improve your web site ranking with Google and the other search engines is to improve your inbound link popularity.

Our website has some good inbound links from other companies. However, most of our inbound links are to our homepage. Our web site has several "micro-centres" for different products, each with their own "home page", and we want these individual pages to rank highly in the search engines as well. My question is...will the inbound links we have to our home page help boost the popularity of the "inner" pages of our website or do we have to have to work on boosting the link popularity of the individual pages we want to rank highly as well?

Many thanks
Andrea

[topr8]

welcome to WebmasterWorld

the basic premis of page rank / link popularity is that a page will pass on its "value" to the pages it links to.

so the pages you link to from your homepage, external and internal, will benefit from the pr of the homepage.

there is benefit to aquire incoming links to your homepage and also incoming links to pages deeper in the site

[takagi]

I'm sure you will have direct or indirect links from your home page to those "micro-centres", so you already give some PR from the home page to the sub pages. Pages linked from your home page usually have a lower PageRank (PR) than the home page. But there are examples of sites with a lot of inbound deep links like www.nobel.se (official site about the Nobel prize) or the 'about' page at ODP (dmoz.org/about.html) that gets a link from every page in the Google Directory.

So inbound links are always good. Just make sure you also link back to the home page.

[fathom]

there is benefit to aquire incoming links to your homepage and also incoming links to pages deeper in the site

There is enormous bennefit in getting "deeplinks".

Look at this as a city with all one way streets... PageRank is a trickle down affect, link levels further from the PageRank source get less > and eventually the link newtork (roads) have no PageRank and essentially "impassible".

Also note that deeplinked pages usually have far more precise information (the money-makers) therefore the more PageRank that can to these page the better they perform.

By recieving multiple points of inbound links to your site, new PageRank is development deeper in the link (road) structure and you are essentially creating a new highway of PageRank > or pushing PageRank in the reverse direction > up the link structure, so that the link (roads) systems distribute PR more evenly and by doing so inbound traffic (visitors) can enter in increased numbers.