Link-building Tips: Internal Linking Strategies for Directories
A couple of database-generated sites I own have in excess of 50,000 pages each. Building links for these sites requires a different strategy to link-building for my smaller sites with 5 to 10 pages.
With smaller sites you can quite easily build deep links to the inner pages of the site as well as links to the website’s home page. After building links to the main pages on a small site for a few months, you should end up with a good number of landing pages that do well in SERPs.
With larger sites though like PHPLd-based directories or PADKit-enabled software archives, it isn’t practical to build external links to all the pages on the site. The internal linking within larger sites is critical to the website’s performance in SERPs. Ideally, each page should get a decent number of links from some of the other pages within the site. As with all link-building, the best links are those from pages on a similar topic.
Link Back To Category Pages
Almost all large websites have a tree-like structure. The homepage links to category pages, the category pages to sub-categories and then finally, in the case of a software archive, to details pages. In the case of a software archive, each details page will show information about a single software package. The main link juice or PageRank for the site is likely to be provided by the external links to the site’s homepage. The PR will then flow like water through to the category and subcategory pages to the details pages. The link juice can be better distributed around the site by linking back from the deeper pages to the higher level pages as shown in this picture.
Link Related Pages
If the internal linking strategy ends here though, each details page is getting only a small share of the available link juice. By the time the link juice gets to the details pages it’s been divided up many times so that there’s little left. More work must be done to maximise the link juice to the details pages. The details pages are the real content of the site and the pages you really want to do well in SERPs.
A really good way of improving the performance of details pages is to link related details pages together. For example, on a software archive, if a text editor program is listed on one details page, the page could also link to 10 other text editor details pages on the same site. Luckily, when software is submitted to a PAD-enabled software archive, the PAD file lists keywords for the software so with a bit of programming you should be able to quite easily match programs based on keywords.
Thanks for this.
I’m doing SEO for a large directory and this was very helpful.