Thread: Interesting Theory About Internal Linking

Interesting. I would speculate that the home page link penalty has to do with the old standard where a link in the footer to the home page was used to reinforce the main keyword theme for the site, such as "Power Tools" or "Sporting Goods".

I used to do that myself on sites years ago, but I also began to think it was detrimental and stopped doing it a few years ago. I agree with one of the posters in WMW that this penalty has probably been in place for a while.

I just checked rank positions today after setting up about 7 or 8 links over the past week. The main keyword theme for the site dropped one rank position, but related combinations have all gained from 1 to 20 positions. That could be in line with the theory that the main keyword phrase for the site should be avoided in internal links to the home page. In this case, the main keyword theme is in the home page HTML title tag.

The home pages for a lot of the sites that got hit by Penguin have never recovered for their primary search phrase, but inner pages have recovered for long tail keywords.

This all appears to make sense to me and may have something to do with Penguin's overoptimization of backlinks penalty--only this variation applies to internal links.

I just started a second test of this theory. This time, I'm trying to see if it is the reason why an EMD cannot be found for an EMD keyword search.

The WordPress themes designed by the WordPress team place the Site Name in a link to the home page in the footer. I have not been able to explain why one site has never showed up in search results for the EMD keyword search, but it was built with the 2010 theme and I left the site-info code in the footer. The EMD keywords are in the footer link to the home page. I just removed the link from the footer. Let's see what happens.

iowadog just reported the first Panda update for 2013, which could be the explanation for the gains I found with the internal linking in test #1. I will be monitoring that weekly to see if the gains hang in there.

My gut tells me that there is something to the guy's theory about internal linking. I just have to turn over enough rocks to see what I find.

Originally Posted by TopDogger

I just started a second test of this theory. This time, I'm trying to see if it is the reason why an EMD cannot be found for an EMD keyword search.

I have a few sites where I'm using the EMD keyword instead of "Home" in the menu. All these sites have a -950 penalty and I'm wondering if this is the cause.

Originally Posted by bogart

I have a few sites where I'm using the EMD keyword instead of "Home" in the menu. All these sites have a -950 penalty and I'm wondering if this is the cause.

Could be. If it is causing a -950 penalty, that is pretty severe for an undocumented penalty, especially when you consider that all WordPress installations using the default themes designed by the WordPress team use the site name as a link to the home page in all the footer pages.

I wonder if Penguin is looking at all links to a page, including internal links, when it applies a penalty for lack of diversified anchor text. It may be disregarding 'Home', but is hitting sites using keywords.

In my case with the EMD, the penalty was applied for the exact match keyword search prior to Penguin and the EMD update. It was like that when I picked up the site and I have never figured out the cause.

Originally Posted by TopDogger

Could be. If it is causing a -950 penalty, that is pretty severe for an undocumented penalty, especially when you consider that all WordPress installations using the default themes designed by the WordPress team use the site name as a link to the home page in all the footer pages.

I changed the anchor text in the main menu to "Home" yesterday and the site increased +1 in ranking. It appears that this change removed the -950 or "end of results" penalty.

Originally Posted by TopDogger

I wonder if Penguin is looking at all links to a page, including internal links, when it applies a penalty for lack of diversified anchor text. It may be disregarding 'Home', but is hitting sites using keywords.

I'm guessing that the -950 penalty is outside of the scope of Penguin. Though it makes sense that Penguin would use both internal and external links to apply a penalty for lack of diversified anchor text.

In addition to 'Home' other text like "Click Here" are most likely disregarded.

I found some of my older sites that were no longer driving much traffic had the site name as a home page link in the footer. I just changed them all. Time will tell if this fixes anything.

Originally Posted by TopDogger

I found some of my older sites that were no longer driving much traffic had the site name as a home page link in the footer. I just changed them all. Time will tell if this fixes anything.

Search Engine Land has a story about a Penguin recovery due to removing Wordpress footer links. This is another indication that sitewide links can cause a Penguin penalty.

I really, reading that article and others, see nothing that says or implies that sitewide links on a blog causes any sort of a penguin problem.

There are those webmasters who obsess, and anally so, and start removing all sitewide links on their blogs.
For what end?
Who knows?

Then other webmasters who have never obsessed or got excited about penguins and pandas and hamsters do nothing to their blogs and guess what?
Their blogs are live, doing well, found in google, doing good for keywords, etc.

I belong to that second part.
I just, on my 3 blogs, continue on just posting.
Not caring, not getting excited, about damn links on the blogs and that some of them are sitewide.

The sitewide links may be o.k. The issue is that over-optimized 'anchor text' on 'money' keywords can trip a Penguin penalty.

I agree with you that for the sites that are doing well in Google, there no reason to obsess on Panda/Penguin. But the sites that are penalized how to make some moves to try to get the penalty removed.

I think that in most cases, it's better to start over. You'd probably spend more time removing links than it would take you to build a new site.

Originally Posted by iowadawg

I really, reading that article and others, see nothing that says or implies that sitewide links on a blog causes any sort of a penguin problem.

There are those webmasters who obsess, and anally so, and start removing all sitewide links on their blogs.
For what end?
Who knows?

A quick follow-up a couple of weeks later. I removed the site-wide links into a couple of sites that were penalized and received some improvement at first i.e. one site was -950 and moved to approx #200. Now the site is -947. I can't say for certain whether the change needs to propagate to all the data centers or something else has happened.

Google is so slow to make Pengin/Panda rollouts that at some point it's not worth the effort.

Dawg is right and you need to concentrate your resources on doing what you need to do like content creation and improving your site.