Posted by randfish How does the flow of link equity work these days, and how can you harness its potential to help improve your rankings? Whether you're in need of a refresher or you've always wanted a firmer grasp of the concept, this week's Whiteboard Friday is required watching. Rand covers the basic principles of link equity, outlines common flow issues your site might be encountering, and provides a series of action items to ensure your site is riding the right currents. Video TranscriptionHowdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about understanding and harnessing link equity flow, primarily internal link equity flow, so that you can get better rankings and execute on your SEO. A big thank you to William Chou, @WChouWMX on Twitter, for suggesting this topic. If you have a topic or something that you would like to see on Whiteboard Friday, tweet at me. We'll add it to the list. Principles of link equitySo some principles of link equity first to be aware of before we dive into some examples. 1. External links generally give more ranking value and potential ranking boosts than internal links.That is not to say, though, that internal links provide no link equity, and in fact, many pages that earn few or no external links can still rank well if a domain itself is well linked to and that page is on that site and has links from other good, important pages on the domain. But if a page is orphaned or if a domain has no links at all, extremely difficult to rank. 2. Well-linked-to pages, both internal and external, pass more link equity than those that are poorly linked to.I think this makes intuitive sense to all of us who have understood the concept of PageRank over the years. Basically, if a page accrues many links, especially from other important pages, that page's ability to pass its link equity to other pages, to give a boost in ranking ability is stronger than if a page is very poorly linked to or not linked to at all. 3. Pages with fewer links tend to pass more equity to their targets than pages with more links.Again, going off the old concept of PageRank, if you have a page with hundreds or thousands of links on it, each of those receives a much more fractional, smaller amount of the link equity that could be passed to it than if you have a page with only a few links on it. This is not universally... well, I just want to say this doesn't scale perfectly. So it's not the case that if you were to trim down your high link earning pages to having only one link and point to this particular page on your site, then you suddenly get tremendously more benefit than if you had your normal navigation on that page and you link to your homepage and About page and products page. That's not really the case. But if you had a page that had hundreds of links in a row and you instead made that page have only a few links to the most important, most valuable places, you'll get more equity out of that, more rank boosting ability. 4. Hacks and tricks like "nofollow" are often ineffective at shaping the flow of link equity.Using rel="no follow" or embedding a remotely executable JavaScript file that makes it so that browsers can see the links and visitors can, but Google is unlikely to see or follow those links, to shape the flow of your link equity is generally (a) a poor use of your time, because it doesn't affect things that much. The old-school PageRank algorithm not that hugely important anymore. And (b) Google is often pretty good at interpreting and discounting these things. So it tends to not be worth your time at all. 5. Redirects and canonicalization lose a small amount of link equity. Non-ideal ones like 302s, JS redirects, etc. may lose more than 301, rel=canonical, etc.So if I have a 301 or a rel=canonical from one page to another, those will lose or cost you a small, a very small amount of link equity. But more potentially costly would be using non-ideal types of redirects or canonicalization methods, like a JavaScript-based redirect or a 302 or a 307 instead of a 301. If you're going to do a redirect or if you're going to do canonicalization, 301s or rel=canonicals are the way to go. Common link equity flow issuesA. A few pages on a large site get all the external links:You have a relatively large site, let's say thousands to tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of pages, and only a few of those pages are earning any substantial quantity of external links. I have highlighted those in pink. So these pages are pointing to these pink ones. But on this website you have other pages, pages like these purple ones, where you essentially are wanting to earn link equity, because you know that you need to rank for these terms and pages that these purple ones are targeting, but they're not getting the external links that these pink pages are. In these cases, it's important to try a few things.
B. Only the homepage of a smaller site gets any external links.This time we're dealing with a small site, a very, very small site, 5 pages, 10 pages, maybe even up to 50 pages, but generally a very small site. Often a lot of small businesses, a lot of local businesses have this type of presence, and only the homepage gets any link equity at all. So what do we do in those cases? There's not a whole lot to spread around. The homepage can only link to so many places. We have to serve users first. If we don't, we're definitely going to fall in the search engine rankings. So in this case, where the pink link earner is the homepage, there are two things we can do:
C. Mid-long tail KW-targeting pages are hidden or minimized by the site's nav/IA.So this is essentially where I have a large site, and I have pages that are targeting keywords that don't get a ton of volume, but they're still important. They could really boost the value that we get from our website, because they're hyper-targeted to good customers for us. In this case, one of the challenges is they're hidden by your information architecture. So your top-level navigation and maybe even your secondary-level navigation just doesn't link to them. So they're just buried deep down in the website, under a whole bunch of other stuff. In these cases, there are some really good solutions.
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