Busby SEO Test – Does Internal Linking Pattern Still Do The Trick?

In other words, do your sitewide links pointing to your favourite post still provide a significant boost to its ranking? Or on the contrary, they will cause your featured post to be penalized by Google?

Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz did some testing around internal links and anchor text and found some interesting results.

1. Internal Anchor Text Has Very Little Impact on the Homepage
2. Excessive Internal Anchor Text Linking / Manipulation Can Trip An Automated Penalty on Google
3. Beyond a Certain Point, Adding More Internal Links to a Page Does Not Necessarily Flow More Anchor Text Value

In my early effort to compete in Busby SEO Test, I placed links to my competing page almost everywhere on my site and feed. Whether it triggers or not bad reactions from Google, I decided to reduce the amount of patternal internal linking to my Busby SEO Test page.

Rand’s experiment suggest that previously penalized page is restored its position and indexing right away after the excessive links are removed. However, there is also an assumption that immediate change to your internal linking structure can cause another penalty. These two poles apart theory of how Google works makes either if I keep the links or not both risky alternatives.

So why did I choose to strip the links?

I believe that Google is getting more human in determining which links are natural and staying away from patterns time to time. Therefore I tried to emerge links to the articles I want to promote the most natural way. One of the methods I’m using is by writing related articles and using the related articles plugin. The related articles list is a dynamic list which content changes everytime new articles are submitted.

Other way, if I choose to display links to the Busby SEO Test page to increase awareness, I’d add the nofollow attribute to make it bot friendly .

How about links on your navbar or sidebar? I’ll say leave them as they were. I do. However I try not to add more sitewide internal links in the future.

 

I’d love to know your experience in your own sitewide internal linking. Do they bring satisfying results? And if you made any changes to your linking structure, hows the result?

Review this article and get a chance to win $250! More information here.

Busby SEO Test

What is Busby SEO Test?

photo by Mike Licht

Busby SEO Test is the second SEO contest held by Busby Web Solutions taking place from 1st October 2008 to 31st January 2009. The contestans’ aim is to have their page optimized for the following keyword, “Busby SEO Test”. On the closing date, the winner will be determined from which page achieve the number one hot seat on the Google search result of Busby SEO Test and page’s owner gets the prize. What prizes you ask…?

Busby SEO Test prize

The Busby SEO Test prize will be distributed among the five winners with details like the following:

1. First Prize : $5000
2. Second Prize : $2000
3. Third Prize : $500
4. Fourth Prize : $250
5. Fifth Prize : $100

Busby SEO Test rules

The contestants will need to follow and adhere these rules:

1. The Busby SEO Test start date and end date are according to the above mentioned (October 1st 2008, (12:00 midday), Perth, Western Australia time  – January 31st 2009, (12:00 midday), Perth, Western Australia time).
2. The particpants are allowed to use only ethical SEO techniques (or known as white hat SEO) and the judges are allowed to review the techniques and methods applied by the winner to make sure they meet the terms.
3. The use of pornographic, discrimination and illegal content or behaviour are not allowed.
4. The domain and sub domains registered to the Busby SEO Test may not include the keyword or keyphrase in any form.
5. You need to be registered to have your entry eligible to win the Busby SEO Test. The full list of the contest is published here.
6. Registration takes no cost, open to everybody anywhere and only valid through the official Registration Process.
7. Participating pages to Busby SEO Test need to have a working and visible link to www.busbywebsolutions.com with the following text (including the hyperlink) using black arial 10 font:
   

   “Participant in the Busby Web Solutions Search Engine Optimisation Challenge”

8. Each person can only win one prize.
9. The Busby SEO Test contest prize is unavailable for employees, franchisees and licensees of Busby (and each of their family members) but they are eligible to enter the competition.
10. The rules are updated and to find the most up-to-date rules please click here.

 

What to do next?

1. Request your invitation, register and start telling people . Or if you’re already a member, you can signup your participating URL for the Busby SEO Test here.
2. If you’re done, maybe you want to enter the contest yourself. Make sure you understand the rules before applying your tactics.
3. Support the contest and win up to $250 per person. Find out how!.

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homebiz.bukiki.com’s Busby SEO Test update:

In order to achieve the rank at this page’s best effort, it’s important to not focus on mystified SEO techniques and methods. A week ago, a Q&A chat session took place between 750 webmasters around the world and Google insiders themselves. The event took 2 hours and almost a hundred questions are answered. In the questions, are fairy tales, myths and rumors many people believe in, but never heard of Google saying them themselves. Some others are also important real facts bloggers and webmasters need to know in optimizing their site but fail to do so since they focus more on the myths.

I’m sure you’ve heard at least one of these rumors and now’s the time to know the truth about SEO.

SEO myth: Duplicate content will penalize your site

SEO myth: Getting listed in 1000s of search engines and directories is important

SEO myth: If a keyword is important, it’s important to repeat it in important locations on important pages so that the page looks more important to important search engines

SEO myth: PageRank is dead / PageRank is everything!

SEO myth: Once your site ranks high, don’t touch it

Read what Google says about the myths and uncover the truth!