| Good and Bad Internal Linking |
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| Friday, 09 May 2008 | |||||||||||||
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Until recently it was easy to laugh at newspapers and their attempts to move online. Even now many are struggling to catch up. However, some leading papers are proving to be very adept and are rolling out advanced Content Management Systems with great SEO tactics. One favorite strategy is to create highly-targeted pages for particular keywords and promote them heavily with internal links. This is a technique that just wasn't possible back in the days of HTML because of manpower needed to create so many links. However on a Joomla! site its easy and I'll show you how:
What are Internal Links?Internal links to your site are the links that reside on pages that belong to your domain. So links to subdomain and subfolders also count. Why Do This Automatically?If you have a lot of content on your site it can be hard for search engines to work out which page is most relevant for a particular search term. You can help them by automatically linking from a keyphrase to a highly relevant page for that topic. For example, whenever I type sh404SEF it automatically links to our review of that extension. The review is #5 on Google for the phrase "sh404SEF" even though we've written many articles about it.
Creating Automatic Internal Links with JoomlaThere's a great component called "Simply Links" which allows you to create internal links across your site.
Comparison of Two Newspapers' Automatic Internal LinksHere are two newspaper sites, each with very different tactics when it comes to their links and their landing pages:
Analyze Your Internal Links1) You can find out how many pages on your site currently link to a particular page with a query like this: link:http://www.alledia.com/blog/joomla-urls/review-of-sh404sef-url-extension/ site:alledia.com This tells me that about 30 pages on alledia.com link to our review of sh404SEF. 2) Head over to Google Webmaster Tools. Go to Links >> Internal Links. Further Reading
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Comments (15)
  written by Good Web Practices, May 09, 2008
Nice article Steve. Simply Links isn't available yet for Joomla 1.5 though. Do you recommend an alternative for Joomla 1.5?
 written by guido, May 09, 2008
GWP, if you look at the developer's homepage you'll notice the 1.5 version
http://www.nekkarcity.de/opens...-15.html/ it isn't multilingual yet :-( Steve, you forgot an automatical link for Simply links!! :-)  written by Hummerbie, May 09, 2008
Very nice article steve, I especialy like the landing page items.
Now I have to go over my website to get the internal linking just a bit better and create some killer landing pages.  written by Brian Teeman, May 09, 2008
You might be interested to know that the NY Times hand codes everything.
read an interview with Khoi Vinh, Design Director written by Mike Law, May 09, 2008
Only downside with Simply links is that if you have the keyword or phrase in a heading tag it will make it linkable, it would be nice to have it ignore heading tags.
written by Hummerbie, May 10, 2008
@Brain: They handcode the templates lyaout with html and css, the urls and internal linking is done by the C.M.S. they use. But you now that :-)
It is a great article to read about how a large website still can come up with special things to do make it more intresting for their visitors in means of spcecial layouts. Thanks for sharing this article, its a great find. written by Anne H, May 10, 2008
I think some credit goes to Marshall Simmonds for the NYT success.
written by Guysmiley, May 10, 2008
Great article, and we've been looking at this concept for some time but struggling to create these internal links 'the old fashioned way'. 'Simply Links' is a great solution for sites on j1.0x... Is there an automated culprit for those who have faithfully lept to the 1.5x framework?
written by Guysmiley, May 10, 2008
A follow-up to my previous post:
j1.5 Simply Links: http://www.nekkarcity.de/ Does this extension get the Alledia thumbs up as well? Is it heavy on database calls?  written by Steve Burge, May 12, 2008
Guido - I've added an automatic link to this article for "Simply Links"
 Guysmiley - I haven't tested on 1.5 yet ... will try to do that this week. Hummerbie - welcome back. Haven't seen you around for a while Mashable.com did this and got some bad feedback because they handled it badly, linking "Techcrunch" to their own page about the site rather than Techcrunch.com, for example: http://mashable.com/2007/10/20...explained/ written by Hummerbie, May 12, 2008
@Steve: I have been working real hard on some customer websites, and I had to take some time off blogging for other projects like a complex active directory conversion in my normal dayjob.
You will see some posts and articles on my Blogs and website on Joomla 1.5 and SEO...  written by Mark Simpson, May 13, 2008
Good article, Steve, thanks.
I liken this to the Hosting industry practice of selling "Unlimited bandwidth and HDD space". It's despicable, to be sure... but because everyone else is doing it, you gotta do so as well if you want to stay in the race.   written by Mark Simpson, May 13, 2008
Also... It's almost impossible to battle wikipedia for a spot but this could at least keep Mahalo at bay.
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