101 Articles Internal Link Spamming
INTERNAL LINK SPAMMING
A good internal link structure is important for search engine ranking. But there are some unethical websites that do excessive spamming of their internal links. Loading 100s of links on a page and cross linking them across other pages to transfer internal PageRank has been a strategy used by many Search engine spammers. Aggressive internal linking itself cannot trigger a penalty since search engines are very concerned on penalizing websites. But too much internal linking disturbs a search engine, which is why we call it a search engine manipulation strategy.
Internal linking doesn't stop with excessive cross linking there are some people who link from a single inner page to their homepage with lots of different anchor text. Sometimes they reference the homepage itself with various keyword anchor text from the homepage itself. This tactic was used as a search engine optimization tactic but search engines are careful in detecting these types of stuff.
Introduction:
The concept of internal linking plays a heavy role in deciding the fate of the website. It enormously influences the ranking of your website for multiple phrases. While developing a website pertaining to search engine optimization strategies, link building is a very important strategy to influence a website's fate. Outbound links largely influences the ranking algorithms to rank your website better and index it at the top so that it can be displayed among the top 10 result sets pertaining to a search phrase.
However, though websites depend tremendously upon link building strategies to boost their website ranking and in turn their business, the structure of the website also plays a critical role. A good website as we all know is well structured, user friendly and navigational. This not only provides useful information to people but also makes it easy for crawlers and bots deployed by search engines to identify the web pages and index them accordingly.
Links within your website matters a lot. You have total and complete control of those links. If these internal links are used properly, they can boost your website ranking sufficiently enabling you to feature within the top 10 result sets pertaining to a search phrase. This is one among the efficient SEO techniques employed by several website owners, SEO firms and other web developing companies.
Things that could be done by internal linking structure:
1. It ensures that websites gets properly spidered and all the webpages are found by the search engines.
2. Builds the relevancy of the page to a keyword phrase
3. Increase the PageRank of the individual internal webpages.
How people manipulate search engines by using internal link spam:
Search engine ranking algorithms are heavily driven by the traffic a website derives, keyword stuffing related to the search phrase, contents and its quality, the amount of external links that point to a particular site or a webpage, internal links that makes the website navigable and identifiable for crawlers to index them and assign a PageRank for each individual page of that particular website based upon its importance.This internal link strategy basically identifies individual webpages and rates them based upon its importance. All these points add up to the total of the website's rank which allows them to be listed to viewers based upon that value in the search engine result lists.
The closer the page is in clicks from your website's homepage, the higher the value (PageRank) the page is assigned. In simple words if I have a page linked to my homepage of my website, this particular page will be given more weight than another page that is five or six levels deeper in my site.
Ethical practices involve creating an internal structure that is reliable, informative and useful for its viewers. You need not link each and every page to its homepage. All you need to do is figure out what the main phrases are and which pages are most likely to be ranked for the same. You can make use of text links to these internal pages on your homepage.
Website owners as they have realized that a page closer to the homepage carries more weight and rated better than other pages eventually links each and every page of their website to their homepage to make every page seem important and generate more brownie points for their websites to influence the website's ranking as a whole. This also influences the relevancy of the page to a keyword phrase. This manipulates the keyword factor followed by search engines algorithms when it comes to rating a webpage or a website as a whole. As an expert I have comes across websites in which every webpage has been linked to their homepage. The result of such a practice is that they were always rated better than other genuine websites and they were always listed among the top 10 search results pertaining to a search phrase. This is another unethical blackhat SEO technique employed by spammers to get more business for their websites not allowing other websites to even compete or make business.
Also spammer's websites does not provide useful contents or information and thus they degrade the search engine's efficiency of providing related information to viewers who seek for particular information.
Let us assume if a homepage is ranked as PageRank 6, the pages linked to in order will be ranked as 5, 4,3,2,1 etc. The page connected directly to the homepage will be rated as 5. If all the webpages of the particular website is connected directly to the homepage, they will all share the same rank which influences the overall website rank as well as allows the web pages to be listed more predominantly in most search lists pertaining to a search phrase. Thereby this particular website will always be listed among the top 10 result sets pertaining to the search phrase owing to8 its high individual PageRanks. This is predominantly classified as internal link spam which search engines are pretty aware of. Eventually if such practices are found in your website it is bound to get banned. Search engines took this initiative after several similar practices followed by spammers and hackers.
'Nofollow' attribute:
'Nofollow' is a value assigned to the 'rel' attribute in a HTML document. It is an element that instructs the search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine index. It is basically intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain type of search engine spam. 'Nofollow' attribute is not meant for blocking access to content or preventing indexing of certain webpages. SEO firms started using this attribute to control the flow of PageRank within a website. Since Google took corrective measures, any link (both internal as well as external) with a 'nofollow' attribute decreases the PR value of the page that it can pass on. This is otherwise known as "PageRank Sculpting". Originally this attribute was designed to control the flow from one particular website to another. SEO have suggested that a 'nofollow' used for an internal link should just as same as a 'nofollow' created for an external link. Some pages such as About Us, Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions, Contact Us etc are not important enough to earn a PageRank and should have 'nofollow' on internal links pointing to them.
The entire debate is still under progress and no conclusion is yet to be reached. SEO firms believe that certain pages such as mentioned above do not deserve to decide the popularity or the rating of that particular website while site search proponents have pointed out to the fact that viewers do not search for such pages and having a 'nofollow' attribute in internal links pointing to them makes it difficult or impossible for viewers to find these pages in site searches provided by major and popular search engines.
On one side you have an unethical search engine optimization to influence individual webpage's PageRank which decides the fate of that particular website entirely. Pages which are of least importance should have negligible PageRank value and they shouldn't take part on determining the rank for that particular website. On other hand, without these internal links, site becomes un-navigable and certain pages cannot be indexed or searched for powered by search engines.
Internal linking is a must for websites to be identified, crawled and indexed. It is to be structured in a proper way and ethical pursuits of search engine optimization should be followed. It does influence the PageRank factors of the search engine algorithms. However linking all of your website pages to the homepage thereby influencing the search engine algorithms to be listed among the top 10 result sets pertaining to a particular search phrase is wrong and should never be followed. Such practices are judged as spam by search engines. As a website owner if you do so, you are the one who is bound to lose business as your site will be banned eventually.
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Internal Links are hyperlinks that point at (target) the same domain as the domain that the link exists on (source). In layman's terms, an internal link is one that points to another page on the same website.
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Other sites that refer to the same manipulation tactic are as follows |
