Why Deep Linking Is Important For Your Link Portfolio
March 16, 2010 by Pablo Palatnik
One of the toughest things about SEO is acquiring solid links. As most website/business owners, the mighty homepage is always the most important page to rank for, do keyword analysis, etc. We tend to focus on the homepage linking strategy to ensure good rankings and pagerank for domain authority from Google. But, deep linking will play a role in the rankings of your homepage and overall rankings of your entire page.
SO? If you think about it in some common terms, let’s think about it for a bit. Google hates spam and yes, just because all your links maybe pointing to your homepage DOESN’T mean it’s spamming BUT what is that signaling to Google? Maybe you have no other important content in your website other than your homepage. Maybe you have absolutely nothing worth linking to in your website other than your homepage. Maybe Google is thinking, “HEY, if this guy doesn’t build any other links (or acquire naturally) to other pages on his website, then why should we care much about it ourselves?”
Deep linking can mean a lot, and the more available linking resources you can use for deep linking while maintaining a good linking strategy to your main page that you want to optimize for, the better off you’ll be in the SEO of your website and overall strategy. SearchEngineLand today had a good titled, “Link Week 5 Reasons To Make Sure You’re Deep Linking,” Julie Joyce points out 5 reasons for deep linking and their importance.
1. Usability
2. Link Profile
3. Traffic
4. Rankings
5. Avoid Penalties
I know most of you reading this right now may be concerned off the bat with #5, AVOID PENALTIES, WHAT? As Joyce states, “Well, this one’s more of an ‘I hope it does” than an actual rule, but it makes sense that if a site ONLY has backlinks coming into the homepage, it looks a bit unnatural.”
The best linking portfolio is that one which looks natural which includes ALL types of links, as she also states, “…homepage links, subpage links, links with missing anchor text, links with “Click Here!” anchor text, links with fantastic anchor text, sitewides, footer links, in-content links, links from site you wouldn’t want to show your mother, etc. Organic link growth truly does happen in a somewhat random fashion, and if you have more than one decent page on your site, you should have links to those pages sprinkled here and there.”
