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 To get good page rank on the search engine results pages all the internal links on your website must be accessible to the robots that crawl websites on behalf of the major search engines. Maybe it's time for an audit.
Your Internal Links Say A Lot About You
I’m talking about the links on your site… the links that connect one page to another, for example the link on your home page navigation bar that leads to the content article buried deep in your site. These internal links provide robots the ability to crawl the site. Plus, internal links pass link popularity and keyword signals about the pages found deep in your site. Yup, just like back links do.
If the links on your site are not “callable” or findable to search engine robots your site will be limited in its success for the search terms you hope to target. That means lower rank on Google results pages and less traffic which means lower sales.
Common Internal Link Problems
The search engine robots are getting better at calling more complicated sites. But, Search engines do not get crawl with JavaScript and CSS turned on for links. If you have a very fancy menu system that flies out, or runs as an accordion you may have a problem.
Robotic search spiders also don’t accept cookies! So if your interactive web site designed with lots of jav script or flash may be only minimally callable Unless specific optimization techniques are used.
Alternate Internal Linking Methods
Even not so complex elements such as expandable navigation and most rollovers can be coded in ways that are more or less callable. But do yourself a favor and plan to include alternative methods for linking on your site if you simply must have these interactive and dynamic elements.
Three quick internal link fixes you might try:
- One common technique is to include important links in footer text where they also show up on every page
- Another very common method is to have a high quality site map for your website. You can submit a URL for your site map directly to Google, Yahoo!, and Bing through their web master tools. Google will be all over it very fast… Bing is much slower.
- Another quick and easy fix is to make links based on search parameters. These work well because they pull up the listing of other pages which is then follow below the buy search engine robots.
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