What Percentage Of Backlinks Should Point To Homepage?
Posted on June 22, 2010
Filed Under SEO
If you wondered whether you should build links to your homepage mostly or whether there’s a system to it, check out the following Q&A and my approach to building backlinks…
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Hi Tomaz,
I know you always stress in the forums how important getting back links is. I’m just starting up serious link campains for my 2 year old site and also my 5 month old sites and I wanted your experience and advice on something.
I always tend to link to the home page when I do (what little I’ve done) link building but I imagine getting a nice range of deep links would be even more beneficial. If you had to allocate 100% of your inbound links to all 3 tiers of your site how you would do it?
Homepage 50-60%
Tier 2 – 20-30%
Tier 3 – 10-20%
…or does it not even matter? Can we just vary the link text, link everything back to the home page only and still get good results?
Thank you for any insight you can offer.
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I typically build links to homepage first. Since I optimize my homepage for at least 3 different keywords, I try to get links to it with those keywords in link text.
Once I start ranking well (let’s say even in top 20), I alternate between building links to homepage and to T2 pages.
I typically continue to do that and focus then on those T2 pages that still don’t rank that well.
I don’t look at some predetermined percentage, I look at the results.
If my homepage ranks in top 3 for my main keywords, then I don’t need to build links to it anymore.
If I get a chance for a very strong link from an established site I would still probably try and get it to the homepage – just to strengthen the whole site.
But generally I would look at my T2 pages and build links to those which still don’t rank well. I rarely build links to T3 except if those T3 keywords have really good demand (around 1000 based on SBI MKL) and it’s actually worth getting that page higher in the rankings.
So in summary – I don’t have a system of percentages but I build links based on what needs to be done.
If the page (usually T2) doesn’t rank well, I try to get links to it. I still look to get links to the homepage too here and there…
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Comments
10 Responses to “What Percentage Of Backlinks Should Point To Homepage?”
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Thanks Tomaz:
Exactly the information I needed on back-linking. Thanks too for your generosity in sharing these concepts.
Onward with purpose,
Chaplain Paul Slater
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This information is great Tomaz. What I found even more eye opening was the link to optimizing Tier 2 keywords as Tier 1 keywords in your homepage title. I had no idea about doing this!
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Thanks, Tomaz. I had been wondering about exactly this question! Another incredibly helpful post.
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I often wondered about this. I started linking to Tier 2 pages using article submissions recently. It definitely has helped me move up in the rankings for those keywords.
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Very interesting Tomaz,
you start by ranking for your homepage keywords then the tier 2 keywords,
do you find that ranking for your homepages keywords that this trickles down to help you rank for your tier 2 and 3 pages with less effort than if you started to try and rank for your tier 3 pages as I think most people do.
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Thanks again, Tomaz, for some great information, especially in the older post you linked to!
I just learned that the keyword I was trying to rank for, for my homepage, will be almost impossible to win because of the competition. I spent the last 2-3 months building links with that keyword!
In any case, I’m learning a lot and hope to avoid the same mistakes when I get around to building my next site.
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Question for Nisheth.
Are you getting much commission from Amazon? I get hardly any commission from Amazon, but send them alot of traffic. It just doesn’t convert for me.
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Tomaz, I have a question, sort of related to this. I’ve just started a blog as part of my site.
I’ve used infinit! to create a subdomain and have a wordpress blog hosted at bluehost. So my blog is a sub-domain of my site.
Should I be looking to build links to my blog – treat it like any other page? Or is there some other methods I should be using to promote the blog?
Do backlinks to a sub-domain benefit the whole site?
Cheers, John
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Hello Mark,
I get a measly 120 visitors a day and I have a CTR of around 1%. This month I have made $16 dollars with them through 2 purchases.
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For my new website to which I am building backlinks for the past month, I just now wondered if I should be linking to pages other than my home page. I think based on the article and commentary here, I will continue to link to my home page especially for comment posting. For discussions where a link is relevant (and allowed), I tend to link directly to the specific page (not home page). Since most comment posting sites do not support the anchor tag, there is little I can do to leverage the added power of anchor text. When I look at my Google Webmaster Tool stats, my highest ranked keyword is “david”!
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