Optimizing Internal link is a an important part of Search Engine Optimization(SEO). The question that many have about internal links is : Are there any rules as to what I should and should not link to from my homepage for SEO? and the simple answer is Minimize unnecessary homepage links for better link weight distribution.

Now you might be wondering what I am saying about. So let’s just talk about how links works on internet and how they influence search engines.

Understanding Links

First lets us understand what external links are. In simple words external links are links that are pointed from websites that are not on your domain into your domain.

So in this example we have your homepage and we have 3 websites linked to your homepage. Now you might notice LV in the image and it is the Link Value. It is the value of incoming links you get and that value is set based on the links that goes out from the website that links to your site.  That is why Google is a high quality search engine because they look at the link relationship between sites to decide where a site ranks.

In this case the link value from website 1 is 58, from website 2 it is 15 and 44 from website 3. So the homepage link value comes to 100. The reason that it is not more than 100 even though when you add all those up it’s more than 100 is because there is a decay of those links when coming from their website to yours.

You can see a math at the corner of the page and what that means is when you add up 58, 15, 44 add multiply by .85 you get 100 and that is the link value of your home page.

Internal Link Distribution

So taking that to the next level let’s talk about your homepage and where your homepage links to. So in this example we are taking homepage with link value of 100 and let’s take there are 5 links on that page. This is a pretty low number. If you take most of the websites there are more than 5 links on the homepage.

Basically the way you calculate how that link value from homepage is distributed out to other pages is you take homepage link value which is 100 and divide it by the total number of links (5) that are pointed out and multiply it by decay factor of 0.85 and what you end up with is 17.

So the link value if the only links pointed to the 5 pages are the links from homepage is 17 and that link vale help those pages to rank higher in search engines. So I want to make the point that if your homepage has more links to different pages on your website then each of those pages are going to get less link value.

Why Link Optimization is Important

In the below figure you can see that if a page has just a single outgoing link then it is going to pass maximum link value and when the number of outgoing links increase the the link value that it pass reduces accordingly.

So the lesson here is: The more links you have in your homepage (and other pages) the less link value will pass to the pages it links to. Try to link only your most important pages from the homepage to increase those pages’ rankings.