Are you sure that you know how link equity flow works these days? And are you aware that if you harness its’ full potential, you can boost your rankings at an incredible pace? No matter if you need a refresher, or you want to learn the thing from the bottom up, you’ve come to the right place. Today, we’re talking about advanced techniques for improving link equity.
First, we’ll cover the basic principles and outline the common flow issues. And after that, we’ll provide a series of actions you can take to make sure your site is on the right path. So, sit back and dive into the world of SEO.
Basic Principles of Link Equity
Before we dive into examples, you need to be aware of some principles there are. These are all the basic things that you’ll have to know if you want to spend time dealing with advanced SEO techniques.
External Links are Worth More Than Internal
We’ll start with a thing most of you already know – external links will give you more ranking value and potential boosts than any kind of internal link. However, this doesn’t mean that internal links don’t provide any link equity. On the contrary, they’re important as well.
If the domain is well linked to, and if you link a post from other good relevant pages on the site, it can rank pretty well. Read our post about maximizing your internal link juice if you want to learn more. On the other hand, if the page is orphaned, or if the domain doesn’t have any external links leading to it, all the chances are that it won’t rank high.
Well-Linked Pages Pass More Link Equity
This is another one of the basics that intuitively makes sense. To put it simply, if a page has a lot of links leading to it – it gets an ability to pass its link equity to other pages. It’s an important thing to note that it helps if these links are coming from other important pages.
If a page we’re talking about is very poorly linked, or not linked at all, it will perform badly in boosting other pages.
Too Many Links isn’t Good Either
Because of the previous paragraph, you may assume that a page with hundreds of thousands of links will perform better than one with just a few of them. And you would be wrong.
When a page has that many links, each one of those receives a smaller amount of the link equity that could be passed on. This, of course, isn’t always the case and it doesn’t scale perfectly. So, make sure to remember that.
Don’t go around and trim down all of your high link earning pages. However, if you exchange hundreds of links in a row with a few that are considered high-quality backlinks, you will see a nice benefit.
Common Link Equity Flow Issues
Now, we’ll deal with advanced techniques for improving link equity in a manner that may be a little bit different from what you might expect. We’ll note the issues that are commonly occurring and explain to you how to get rid of them.
As we see it, it’s the best way to teach you all the secrets to the best techniques there are. You’ll immediately recognize the problems you have. And the good thing is that you’ll know how to fix everything.
A Few Pages Get All External Links
Since Link Department provides services for many different websites, we have some insight information. And this issue can often be seen on sites that are relatively large. Let’s say thousands to tens of thousands of pages, or even more.
If you have such a site, it’s not good if just only a few of those pages get all external links. There must be other pages for which you want to earn link equity and for which you want to rank high also. So, what can you do?
- Identify the most important non-link earning pages.
- Optimize your internal links. Find a natural way to link from the pages that earned the highest link equity to the ones that don’t have any.
- Rework and republish old posts. Compare the two examples and find the differences. Then try to rework the not-so-great performing article into a great one. After that, it’s just the case of republishing and restarting a marketing campaign.
Only the Homepage Gets External Links
Contrary to the last one, this is a problem that can be seen on small sites. We’re talking about things like small businesses and local stores. With sites like these, only the homepage gets any link equity at all.
In a case like this, there’s not much to spread around. The homepage can carry just as much weight, but there are steps you can take if you want to stay on top of your game.
- Ensure that homepage is targeting and focusing on the most critical keyword targets. Sometimes, there’s nothing wrong with having the homepage target the specific query. If you’re a small business you don’t have to focus on your online branding or anchor text diversity too much. It’s much more effective to make your homepage the target that searcher intent. Especially if it fits the user journey.
- Add some content. Some pages simply aren’t link-worthy. But, there must be a kind of content you can create that would fit into your website and that people would link to. The ones that linked to your homepage are the ones that are most likely to link to other pages on your website. So, make some content for them.
Mid-Long Tail KW-Targeting Pages Minimized or Hidden
This is another issue that occurs on larger sites. Hyper-targeted pages sometimes can’t be seen because of your information structure. They get buried deep in the website and it seems that you can’t do anything to dig them up. However, you can.
- Discover semantic and user intent relationships between the pages. Link to these pages from the other ones that are well shown in navigation. Connect them via the same words appearing in the keyword, or via predicted user journey.
- Leverage the top-level category pages. We all have pages like home, products, services, etc. These are usually well internally linked already, so you can try adding links for long-tail pages to them.
- Replace top-level or add second-level pages. If you can’t jam or connect pages we’re talking about with your top-level examples, think about replacing them. Additionally, you can add a second-level page’s section that will consist of these articles. It’s not a difficult task for a web designer, and you can benefit from it.
And that would be all we have on the topic of advanced techniques for improving link equity for today. Be sure to try all these out and we’re sure that you’ll record some fantastic results.