Website Linking Strategies: An Overview of Pass Through Ratio
Linking is the single most important part of search engine optimization. You might have built the most spectacular website in the world, but if no can get to it, or if users can’t find it in the search engines, it serves no purpose. Search Engine Optimization really boils down to 3 basics:
- Keywords - identify the words that users will type into search engines to find your site.
- Optimize - place your keywords within the domain, the URL’s and throughout the site’s content.
- Link - list your site in directories and obtain links from other web sites. Have a good internal linking structure.
Internal Linking Strategies
The most important part of your website is your content, but how that content is accessible is just as crucial. If your users can’t readily find what they are looking for, then they will leave your site and never come back. Every site has some sort of navigation. Whether it is a fancy Flash menu system with rollover effects going across the header or simple text links running down the sidebar, you have to have navigation.
How your internal pages link together outside of the navigation or footer links is extremely important for SEO as well as usability. For now I am concerned with SEO, but if you are interested in linking for usability read: Website Usability Deep Link Navigation. The search engine spiders follow the links within your content as well as the links within your navigation and footer. In fact it is the content links that are of more importance, especially on the home page.
A website and its pages are broken down into tiers. The top tier pages are your home page and any pages that are linked directly from it. The second tier pages are linked from pages other than your home page. For instance if you have a link from your home page to your services page, and from services you link to the individual pages that explain your different offerings, those sub pages are second tier. Those pages that are not linked to the home page, but only to your service page are third tier pages. If you have sub-pages under the different individual services those would be fourth tier pages and so on.
The graphic below shows a 3 tier system and how Google Page Rank diminishes the further a page is linked from the home page. This demonstration is taking into consideration that the tier pages have the proper “Pass Through Ratio”.
Search engines, particularly Google prefer that pages are within the root directory. Many webmasters will make a separate sub folder called /services/ and put that categories pages within it to better organize the files on the web server. Unless your site is dynamic or you have thousands of pages you should keep your pages within the root. This is also important to the tier linking. Pages within the same directory have a much better chance of passing the Page Rank on to its sub pages.
Pass Through Ratio And Why Its So Important To Linking
The pass through ratio is broken down into 2 types:
- Domain Pass Through - the carry over of page rank to pages linked from overall website elements such as footers and navigation.
- Page Pass Through - the carry over of authority and page rank from one page (or tier) to another.
When you are first developing a website drawing out your site linking structure is one of the most overlooked facet of design. You must plan your internal linking carefully to not water down your top tier pages. Too many outbound links on a page (even internal links) will take away its authority and ability to score higher page rank.
More importantly, on an existing website, the addition of new pages and their ability to rank in search engines depends on pass through. Top tier pages that need to also support pages under them must have outside linking to them directly for them to be able to pass on their authority.
When obtaining inbound links whether you do reciprocal link exchange or buy links from a broker make sure to also get links for your internal pages. That is the most important aspect of pass through, the weight of the internal tier pages. My next article will go into detail about link gathering tactics.
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Interesting picture on linking. You can actually do direct linking.