As we enter the season of giving I thought I would talk about the critical importance of sharing links to all of the pages on a site and not just the home page. The other day I saw a site that had about 175 links to the domain and 150 of them were to the home page. When performing a link building campaign for a website deep linking is much more important.
The problem with this ratio is that it does not look natural, a search engine can easily see that the majority of links are all going to root and not to any sub pages. This looks highly unnatural because if you asked 175 people to link to you there will be links to other pages that they seem important. If 90% of all of your links all go to the home page of a site then that looks manipulative.
When you get a search engine crawler on your site you want him to be able to crawl more pages that are deeper within the site and one of the major ways to improve website crawlability is through the internal links that are within a site.
There will be pages within a site that you do not want to spread some link reputation to like terms of service pages and policy pages. If you wish to link to a page and not spread the link reputation to those pages you can use a rel attribute in the link called rel=”nofollow” which will tell Google that you do not wish to pass reputation to that page. Google can crawl and follow those links they will just know that you do not want to pass reputation.
The number one thing to remember about links is that they are like votes and do pass this reputation. If you have a website that has 90% of your links pointing to the home page then that is saying that the other pages on your site are not important to other people that are doing the linking to you.
Deep linking within a website internally and externally are big signs of looking natural to a search engine and also shows where most of the reputation to each page goes. So remember when you are linking within your site and building inbound links to spread the love throughout all of your pages.
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