Deep Linking Strategies DEAD

by Kieran Flanagan on November 4, 2010

That’s a bit of a mouthful and a little bit of a tabloid heading, but one of the most interesting posts over this past week is Tim’s “Deep Page Power, Just What Are Google Up To“. Around the same time as that post was written, I had 2 client sites who’s rankings didn’t change, but the pages that ranked did.

Link Building For Conversions

When most people think of link building, it’s all about rankings, which for the most part is true. But consider the issue when a client sites is getting 80% of their organic traffic to their home page. This has a detrimental affect on conversion rates, because the more relevant page may not be attracting enough links to rank. I consistently see this issue and the decision is always between increasing rank of the home page or begin working on the more relevant inner page (which may take more time).

Google Helping Out

I have seen two examples today of sites who’s home page ranked top 5 for their home page, but now rank there with a more relevant inner page. Their home page has fallen to page 4. It would seem Google could be moving away from weighting page links so heavily, it’s more about domain authority and building a strong overall link profile. The example in Tim’s post is also interesting as GoCompare’s home page used to rank 1st with no mention of the keyword in their page title, but it’s now the more relevant gocompare.com/car-insurance page that ranks.

It’s worth keeping an eye on your overall bounce rate over the coming months and what pages rank for actual keywords. This could result in better results for the user, more relevant pages ranking. But it could really change link building strategies and add another layer of complexity.

Share

Article by Kieran Flanagan

Online Marketer who implements both inbound and paid strategies to help companies grow internationally. Lover of content marketing, SEO, analytics, CRO and strategy. A highly motivated marketing geek high on data crack.

Kieran has written 184 awesome articles for us.

Tim

Hi Keiran,

Its a very interesting change, the most relevant page should be shown, the issue is figuring out how Google find this page. A site: search on the domain for go compare using the keyword car insurance as an extension now brings up the deeper page, however this relevance is in no way built on external links as they don't have any, plus the page is no more relevant than the home page other than the url.

My first thoughts are Google are not basing this relevance on external links or on page factors, instead they are basing it on internal anchor text. I am going to publish a bit of data, not conclusive but will demonstrate my point.
http://www.searchbrat.com/google-instant-preview-deep-page-rankings-better-leads/ Google Instant Preview & Deep Page Rankings = Better Leads

[...] most recent puts a big emphasis on a sites landing page. Google’s shift towards ranking of inner pages and the launch of Google instant preview means a sites landing page are not only important in [...]