Just as external back links are important to your website’s page rank your internal linking structure is of the same importance.
Each page, even the ones with zero page rank, have a page rank assigned to it by Google. The reason you see a zero is not because the page has no rank but because its rank is less than one.
Internal linking optimization helps you distribute the rank within your website in an optimized way that results in higher page rank for your important pages. In the article I will explain some of the important concepts in internal linking optimization.
Internal Page rank leaks
The rank of webpage is distributed among all the pages it links to. For example if a page that has a rank of 3 is linking to 100 pages then each page of the 100 will get a share of the rank. Of course this share will be too small because of the large number of links and that’s why preventing the rank from being distributed on all pages might benefit other pages. For example if you managed to let the page rank get distributed on 10 pages of the 100 instead of being distributed on all the 100 then the 10 pages will have a much higher portion of the main rank.
Your “About” page, your “contact” page or your “frequently asked questions” page might not be as important as your selling page or your website's main page and that’s why you should avoid letting these pages get a share of your page rank.
This can be done by two ways. The first is to use the robots.txt file which can be found under your web root folder. The robots.txt file contains the folders that should not be crawled by search engines and that should not get a share of the page rank. Adding an entry just like the ones below will prevent page rank leaks, for example in the below picture the disallow /misc/ line means that any files under the folder misc will not get crawled by search engines.
The second and the easier method is to set the nofollow attribute to outgoing links. For example if you want to link to a website without leaking your page rank to it then use the following code:
The nofollow attribute is easier to use and does the same exact function. The other advantage the nofollow attribute has is that it doesn't prevent search engines from reaching that page from another link that points to unlike what the robots.txt file does.
xternal page rank leaks
The other reason you might want to do this is to prevent the sites you are linking to from getting a share of your page rank. If you have a page that links to two other pages within your website and a third page in an external website then its better for you to prevent the rank from leaking to the external website so that it gets distributed on your two internal pages.
Internal linking and search results
If your website has strongly interconnected pages and if your internal liking structure is similar to a spider’s web then this is going to help your website in appearing in the top results in search engines. Appearing in the top 10 results in search engines depends on many parameters but one of the very important parameters that determine this ranking is the internal linking structure of your website.
