Influence of internal vs. external links ?

Hi,

I'm completely new to SEO techniques, so I've been reading this group to
try to learn bit, but I still a lot of questions...

I've set up my first web site (that was beginning of march) and am
terribly disappointed at how bad it ranks in Google (I've got to go page
25 to find it, using the keywords I focused on...)

So right now, I'm trying to concentrate on having the home page ranking
higher, and my first question is about links: I understood that Google
takes inbound and outbound links into consideration when ranking a page,
but:
- considering an internal link and an external link, both inbound to my
home page, will they have the same influence ? Is external linking more
important ?
- how do you determine the quality of a link ? Is it related to the page
rank of the page linking to my home page (ie. high page rank means good
quality link) ? Does it mean that if a "bad" page links to me, I will be
negatively affected by this ?
- conversely, if my home page links to bad pages (pages with low page
rank ?), will this be reflected on it ?
- my home page has quite a number of outgoing links to other pages of my
site. Should I reduce this number so that the incoming/outgoing ratio is
higher ? I'm not that much concerned about getting a high page rank
myself here (since it seems that's not so important), but rather being
highly ranked in the SERPs.
- what's the use of a sitemap (from an SE point of view) ? I mean, my
whole site is accessible from the home page through links (no directly
though, you may have to click on 3 links to actually see everything).

Well, thanks for answering these, I'll probably have more soon !

Vincent.


--
Want to spend holidays in France ? Check http://www.relinquiere.com/

"Vincent Poinot" <vincent.use-my-last-name-here (AT) wanadoo (DOT) fr> wrote

Hi,

I'm completely new to SEO techniques, so I've been reading this group to
try to learn bit, but I still a lot of questions...

I've set up my first web site (that was beginning of march) and am
terribly disappointed at how bad it ranks in Google (I've got to go page
25 to find it, using the keywords I focused on...)
If you are terribly disappointed you have previously raised your hopes far

too high. It may take several more months. Be patient.

So right now, I'm trying to concentrate on having the home page ranking
higher, and my first question is about links: I understood that Google
takes inbound and outbound links into consideration when ranking a page,
but:
- considering an internal link and an external link, both inbound to my
home page, will they have the same influence ? Is external linking more
important ?
Internal or external links(across site boundary): Does not make much

difference.
Outgoing or incoming: Incoming are good. Outgoing do little harm unless
to 'bad neighbourhoods' in which case you are in trouble.

- how do you determine the quality of a link ? Is it related to the page
rank of the page linking to my home page (ie. high page rank means good
quality link) ? Does it mean that if a "bad" page links to me, I will be
negatively affected by this ?
The quality of an incoming link is the value to you of the anchor words used

times the PR (approx). If a bad page links to you that is no problem. It
is not your fault.

- conversely, if my home page links to bad pages (pages with low page
rank ?), will this be reflected on it ? Low PR of the destination page is
irrelevent. But *don't link out to spam sites, link farms or 'bad

neighbourhoods'* in which case you are in trouble.

- my home page has quite a number of outgoing links to other pages of my
site. Should I reduce this number so that the incoming/outgoing ratio is
higher ? I'm not that much concerned about getting a high page rank
myself here (since it seems that's not so important), but rather being
highly ranked in the SERPs.
You need links from other pages to the home page with anchor words on them

for good SERPs. Links from your home page to all other pages on your site is
good, as is return links from every page back to the home page. Put in
sufficient extra links to help the visitor navigate.

- what's the use of a sitemap (from an SE point of view) ? I mean, my
whole site is accessible from the home page through links (no directly
though, you may have to click on 3 links to actually see everything).
So that a simple search engine can find the other pages.

Well, thanks for answering these, I'll probably have more soon !

Vincent.
--
Want to spend holidays in France ? Check http://www.relinquiere.com/

A few further points...

Where are the filenames so that a file name can be associated with each
screen of visible content ? Every link should be complete and absolute like
http://www.relinquiere/prices.htm and when activated should produce that
page with the same url filename showing.

Why do you use hidden ultra long hidden filenames like:
"La Relinquière Private bed & breakfast on river Dordogne, between Quercy
and Périgord.htm" This will make search engines put up their arms and say
spam page spam page, apart from breaking conventions and no doubt rules
about url length limits.

I always say keep it very simple and then maybe search engines will manage
make sense of it. This means using static html pages as far as possible, or
at least dynamic pages that come out looking exactly like static html.

Your web site is so complicated that I am amazed you managed to get all that
code working as your first web site. How did you do it?

Best regards, Eric.

Well, thanks for answering these, I'll probably have more soon !

Vincent.

You're #1 on Google for "La Relinquière". The trouble is, no one would ever
search for this term. So why do you have it in your Title and H1 tag? This
is where you should place at least some of the keywords you are targeting.

Regards

--
Andrew Gibson

JELLYPIE SOFTWARE
Digital Video Editing Software, FAQ's, Resources and Filming Tips.
http://www.jellypie.co.uk

After reading Vincent's and Eric's posts, I am confused as to what are
differences between/among incoming and outgoing links and internar and
external links.

For example Vincent writes:

- considering an internal link and an external link, both inbound to my
home page, will they have the same influence ? Is external linking more
important ?

Eric answers:

Internal or external links(across site boundary): Does not make much
difference.
Outgoing or incoming: Incoming are good.

My confusion is with these lines. It would seem to me an external
link inbound to a home page is an incoming link which should be good.
But Eric's answer says internal or external doesn't matter. So what
am I missing? Can anyone explain?

The incoming and outgoing seem straight forward.
Thanks.

On Tue, 4 May 2004 20:23:33 +0100, "Eric Johnston"
<eric.johnston (AT) blueyonder (DOT) co.uk> wrote:

"Vincent Poinot" <vincent.use-my-last-name-here (AT) wanadoo (DOT) fr> wrote in message
news:c78ho6$7pf$1 (AT) news-reader1 (DOT) wanadoo.fr...
Hi,

I'm completely new to SEO techniques, so I've been reading this group to
try to learn bit, but I still a lot of questions...

I've set up my first web site (that was beginning of march) and am
terribly disappointed at how bad it ranks in Google (I've got to go page
25 to find it, using the keywords I focused on...)
If you are terribly disappointed you have previously raised your hopes far
too high. It may take several more months. Be patient.

So right now, I'm trying to concentrate on having the home page ranking
higher, and my first question is about links: I understood that Google
takes inbound and outbound links into consideration when ranking a page,
but:
- considering an internal link and an external link, both inbound to my
home page, will they have the same influence ? Is external linking more
important ?
Internal or external links(across site boundary): Does not make much
difference.
Outgoing or incoming: Incoming are good. Outgoing do little harm unless
to 'bad neighbourhoods' in which case you are in trouble.

- how do you determine the quality of a link ? Is it related to the page
rank of the page linking to my home page (ie. high page rank means good
quality link) ? Does it mean that if a "bad" page links to me, I will be
negatively affected by this ?
The quality of an incoming link is the value to you of the anchor words used
times the PR (approx). If a bad page links to you that is no problem. It
is not your fault.

- conversely, if my home page links to bad pages (pages with low page
rank ?), will this be reflected on it ? Low PR of the destination page is
irrelevent. But *don't link out to spam sites, link farms or 'bad
neighbourhoods'* in which case you are in trouble.

- my home page has quite a number of outgoing links to other pages of my
site. Should I reduce this number so that the incoming/outgoing ratio is
higher ? I'm not that much concerned about getting a high page rank
myself here (since it seems that's not so important), but rather being
highly ranked in the SERPs.
You need links from other pages to the home page with anchor words on them
for good SERPs. Links from your home page to all other pages on your site is
good, as is return links from every page back to the home page. Put in
sufficient extra links to help the visitor navigate.

- what's the use of a sitemap (from an SE point of view) ? I mean, my
whole site is accessible from the home page through links (no directly
though, you may have to click on 3 links to actually see everything).
So that a simple search engine can find the other pages.

Well, thanks for answering these, I'll probably have more soon !

Vincent.
--
Want to spend holidays in France ? Check http://www.relinquiere.com/

A few further points...

Where are the filenames so that a file name can be associated with each
screen of visible content ? Every link should be complete and absolute like
http://www.relinquiere/prices.htm and when activated should produce that
page with the same url filename showing.

Why do you use hidden ultra long hidden filenames like:
"La Relinquière Private bed & breakfast on river Dordogne, between Quercy
and Périgord.htm" This will make search engines put up their arms and say
spam page spam page, apart from breaking conventions and no doubt rules
about url length limits.

I always say keep it very simple and then maybe search engines will manage
make sense of it. This means using static html pages as far as possible, or
at least dynamic pages that come out looking exactly like static html.

Your web site is so complicated that I am amazed you managed to get all that
code working as your first web site. How did you do it?

Best regards, Eric.

Cheers,

Al
www.improvingyourhome.com

Andrew Gibson wrote:

You're #1 on Google for "La Relinquière". The trouble is, no one would ever
search for this term. So why do you have it in your Title and H1 tag? This
is where you should place at least some of the keywords you are targeting.

Regards

Well, the actual title is "La Relinquière : chambres d'hôtes sur la
Dordogne, entre Quercy et Périgord" and the actual H1 is "Chambres
d'hôtes de La Relinquière" (sorry, I'm using the French content because
this is what I'm trying to optimize first).

The keywords I'm focusing on are : chambre hotes Quercy (and possibly
chambre hotes Périgord, chambre hotes Dordogne). This is why the title
is so long : do you think I should shorten it ?

--
Want to spend holidays in France ? Check http://www.relinquiere.com/

Eric Johnston wrote:

I've set up my first web site (that was beginning of march) and am
terribly disappointed at how bad it ranks in Google (I've got to go page
25 to find it, using the keywords I focused on...)

If you are terribly disappointed you have previously raised your hopes far
too high. It may take several more months. Be patient.

Ok. I'll wait, then.

Internal or external links(across site boundary): Does not make much
difference.
Outgoing or incoming: Incoming are good. Outgoing do little harm unless
to 'bad neighbourhoods' in which case you are in trouble.

Hence, the more incoming links, the better, no matter where they come
from. But I should watch my outgoing links. I had my site registered in
a few tourism-related directories (mosly French, one American) : these
directories are basically pages of links to sites like mine. For
example, I'm listed in http://bbonline.com/europe.html (France section):
is this considered a link farm ? Is it ok to be in there (although, I
have to admit it's pretty unlikely that someone picks my site out of the
tens listed there...) ? Is it bad to link to http://wwww.bbonline.com/
(the home page of this directory) ?

The quality of an incoming link is the value to you of the anchor words used
times the PR (approx). If a bad page links to you that is no problem. It
is not your fault.

So, the more accurate the anchor words, and the higher the PR of the
linking page, the higher the PR of the linked page, right ?

- what's the use of a sitemap (from an SE point of view) ? I mean, my
whole site is accessible from the home page through links (no directly
though, you may have to click on 3 links to actually see everything).

So that a simple search engine can find the other pages.

Precisely, this is my point : a simple search engine can find all my
pages starting from the home without resorting to a sitemap... But well,
I guess this is secondary.

Where are the filenames so that a file name can be associated with each
screen of visible content ? Every link should be complete and absolute like
http://www.relinquiere/prices.htm and when activated should produce that
page with the same url filename showing.

I don't understand this: do you mean I should use absolute URL instead
of relative URL as I do ? Do you mean I should break my home page into
smaller subpages (eg. create a dedicated page for the prices whereas
they now appear in the index page) ?

Why do you use hidden ultra long hidden filenames like:
"La Relinquière Private bed & breakfast on river Dordogne, between Quercy
and Périgord.htm" This will make search engines put up their arms and say
spam page spam page, apart from breaking conventions and no doubt rules
about url length limits.

You scare me, now ! My filenames are pretty short I think, the string
you quote is the english title of my index page name index.en.html.
Other pages are contact.en.html, table.en.html, etc. Do you agree with
that, or do you really see overlong filenames ?

I always say keep it very simple and then maybe search engines will manage
make sense of it. This means using static html pages as far as possible, or
at least dynamic pages that come out looking exactly like static html.

All my pages are static HTML, except for my contact pages that are
PHP-generated.

Your web site is so complicated that I am amazed you managed to get all that
code working as your first web site. How did you do it?

Well, I guess you're talking the navigation stuff: it's not so
complicated really, I just decided to include the full navigation menu
in all my pages and to style this menu properly. Right now, I split this
menu into two parts, a horizontal bar (made of the first level LIs) and
sidebar (made of the sub-LIs).
My idea was to provide some more stylesheets in the future, possibly
creating a single CSS-popup menu from the main UL menu, or maybe tabs,
whatever: I thought it would be a good excercise for a beginner, but it
might be not such a good idea from a SE point of view ?

As to how I did it, it's very simple: I use a preprocessing tool to
include and parse snippets of code, ie. the menu is actually defined in
a separate file on my machine, but preprocessed, modified properly and
included in each file.
Same for the banner, the links to the translated pages, etc.

Do you really think it's *too* complicated ?

Best regards, Eric.

Thanks for your comments,

Vincent.


--
Want to spend holidays in France ? Check http://www.relinquiere.com/

Vincent Poinot <vincent.use-my-last-name-here (AT) wanadoo (DOT) fr> says...

Hence, the more incoming links, the better, no matter where they come
from.

Not true. If the Google algorithm decides that they coma from some
place that manipulates search engine results (yours of someone you
hired), you could end up with a very bad ranking.

But I should watch my outgoing links.

This is a matter of much debate. I personally think that outgoing
links to high quality sites that relate well to the content of
your site will help you rather than hurt you. Just my opinion, of
course.

--
Guy Macon, Electronics Engineer & Project Manager for hire.
Remember Doc Brown from the _Back to the Future_ movies? Do you
have an "impossible" engineering project that only someone like
Doc Brown can solve? My resume is at http://www.guymacon.com/

Vincent Poinot <vincent.use-my-last-name-here (AT) wanadoo (DOT) fr> wrote

Well, the actual title is "La Relinquière : chambres d'hôtes sur la
Dordogne, entre Quercy et Périgord" and the actual H1 is "Chambres
d'hôtes de La Relinquière" (sorry, I'm using the French content because
this is what I'm trying to optimize first).

The keywords I'm focusing on are : chambre hotes Quercy (and possibly
chambre hotes Périgord, chambre hotes Dordogne). This is why the title
is so long : do you think I should shorten it ?

Yes and create additional content pages with other keywords you are
targetting. I would have the main page title : Chambres d'Hotes
Dordogne

have a focussed title and then create other pages with titles such as
: Bed and Breakfast, Dordogne; Accomodation entre Quercy et Périgord
etc

Write some blurb about the region, your accomodation etc on the other
pages. Put in photos of the pad, gardens, local sites etc. Relevant
content is king because then people will then have a reason to link to
you.

Vincent Poinot <vincent.use-my-last-name-here (AT) wanadoo (DOT) fr> says...

Guy Macon wrote:

Hence, the more incoming links, the better, no matter where they come
from.

Not true. If the Google algorithm decides that they coma from some
place that manipulates search engine results (yours of someone you
hired), you could end up with a very bad ranking.

Would you agree on the following statement: if an incoming link points
to my page from a "place that manipulates SE results", it will hurt the
ranking of my page (I'm talking about position in SERPs, not PR);
otherwise, it will improve my ranking in some way (depending on the
quality the page that links to me), but it cannot hurts.
Does this sound ok to most of you ?

Sounds right to me.

Now, is this really fair, I mean, I cannot be responsible for people
linking to me, so why should I be penalized if someone decide to point
to my page ?

You have to trust Google to be able to tell the difference between
you cheating and someone deciding to link to your page. There are
pages that a *lot* of people hate (look at the first ten results
for http://www.google.com/search?q=jewwatch ), and nobody has been
able to artificially get a cheating penalty imposed on those pages
despite lots of effort, so you are safe.

But I should watch my outgoing links.

This is a matter of much debate. I personally think that outgoing
links to high quality sites that relate well to the content of
your site will help you rather than hurt you. Just my opinion, of
course.

I guess this is a stupid question for you people used to SEO, but I need
some clear definitions to make my way through this jungle ! What do you
call a "high quality site" ? Is it a site (or rather a page, I assume ?)
that ranks well for keywords similar to the one your targeting, or a
page with a high PR ? (it seems that both are not necessarily related...)

I mean neither. I mean "that which humans find useful" What I am
saying is to put the user first with good content and easy navigation
and high rankings will naturally follow.

Here is a related concept: Make your content and navigation easy for
a blind person using a text-to-speech browser to access and you will
find that you have also made it easy for Google to access.

Perhaps a digression into philosophy will help here. Consider things
from Google's perspective. They want most SEO techniques to not work.
(The exceptions are important; see below.) They don't want the results
to reflect SEO efforts. They have an entire department full of
programmers who are constantly working on making it so that any SEO
technique that artificially raises the ranking no longer works.

That's what they *want* to do. What they are actually *able* to do
is limited by the fact that the algorithms aren't intelligent. This
"human brain vs. computer program" arms race is what makes the SEO
industry possible.

There is one huge exception to the "Google wants most SEO techniques
to not work." principle. Some SEO techniques help the user and make
the web page into something that (in the eyes of the people who run
Google) *deserve* a higher ranking. Examples include:

[1] Make the content more appealing so that more people want to
read it and more webmasters want to link to it.

[2] Make the link structure such that it is easy for the user to
find what he is looking for.

[3] Try to get the kind of incoming link that (because of the
nature of the referring site and the link text) will bring in
users who are looking for the content on your page.

The programmers at Google don't want to defeat the kind of "SEO
techniques that are in the above examples. They want to encourage
those kinds of SEO techniques while discouraging and defeating the
rank-raising power of artificial techniques such as:

[A] Getting a link from a PR7 site that wouldn't have linked to you
if not for your SEO efforts.

[b] Inbound link text that has your target words but wouldn't
if not for your SEO efforts.

[C] Keyword density that isn't a natural outgrowth of you writing
content that people want to read, but is instead something
done for SEO alone.



--
Guy Macon, Electronics Engineer & Project Manager for hire.
Remember Doc Brown from the _Back to the Future_ movies? Do you
have an "impossible" engineering project that only someone like
Doc Brown can solve? My resume is at http://www.guymacon.com/

Guy Macon wrote:

Hence, the more incoming links, the better, no matter where they come
from.


Not true. If the Google algorithm decides that they coma from some
place that manipulates search engine results (yours of someone you
hired), you could end up with a very bad ranking.

Would you agree on the following statement: if an incoming link points
to my page from a "place that manipulates SE results", it will hurt the
ranking of my page (I'm talking about position in SERPs, not PR);
otherwise, it will improve my ranking in some way (depending on the
quality the page that links to me), but it cannot hurts.
Does this sound ok to most of you ?

Now, is this really fair, I mean, I cannot be responsible for people
linking to me, so why should I be penalized if someone decide to point
to my page ?

But I should watch my outgoing links.


This is a matter of much debate. I personally think that outgoing
links to high quality sites that relate well to the content of
your site will help you rather than hurt you. Just my opinion, of
course.

I guess this is a stupid question for you people used to SEO, but I need
some clear definitions to make my way through this jungle ! What do you
call a "high quality site" ? Is it a site (or rather a page, I assume ?)
that ranks well for keywords similar to the one your targetting, or a
page with a high PR ? (it seems that both are not necessarily related...)

Vincent.

--
Want to spend holidays in France ? Check http://www.relinquiere.com/