Link Building: Root Domain or Specific URL

[RealGibson]

Hello!

For the longest time, we've done most of our link building towards the root domain, regardless of anchor text. We're starting to see it take more and more time to achieve the ranking success we want for keywords targeted by specific URL's on the domain. So we're starting to rethink that strategy a bit, but was curious to know if we're better off targeting internal URL's for link building. For example;

Current Process
- Anchor in Links "large onions for sale"
- Link building on URL: "www.biggestveggies.com"

Potential New Process:
- Anchor in Links "large onions for sale"
- Link building on URL: "www.biggestveggies.com/large-onions"

We used to do the "potential new process" before (target internal URL), but found anchor diversity was all keyword anchors and we still weren't achieving ranking.

Just gauging some of your thoughts.

 

[HustleTong]

Do 50-50 for a while and see what happens

 

[praetserge]

Just check any decent website and they all have home page and internal page links. Never seen a ranking website with barely any backlinks to internal pages.
And like in your example, your home page has nothing to do with large onions so why would you link to your home page for large onions?

 

[RealGibson]

Just check any decent website and they all have home page and internal page links. Never seen a ranking website with barely any backlinks to internal pages.
And like in your example, your home page has nothing to do with large onions so why would you link to your home page for large onions?

Honestly, just needed to hear that from someone. It used to be our strategy, but then we found linking to the root domain and adding appropriate internal links (with anchors) was a strategy that worked well and we could easily dilute the anchor text in link building, but we've started to see that strategy take much longer to pay off - so we'll pivot back to link building directly to internal pages.

 

[jimbobo2779]

Both. You should always have links to individual pages as well as your homepage.

 

[tazarbm]

but found anchor diversity was all keyword anchors

that's your problem! Using the same anchors (especially keyword-rich anchors) is one of the easiest ways for google to spot link builders and, thus, penalize them.

Your luck is that anchor-related penalties usually only apply to the page the anchors point to, otherwise your site would have been completely deindexed by now as google are very happy to ban link builders...

I would dilute the anchor texts (and the keyword-rich anchors in particular) and have google discover the new ratios and hopefully your penalized pages will gain / re-gain top rankings if everything else is good...

As for the link splitting.... if you're getting lots of guest post / web 2.0s you can always insert 2-3 links into each guest post / web 2.0, so you can point one of the links to the homepage and the other link(s) to inner pages, categories, your social media accounts, important PDFs / infographics, or anything else that you want to rank. For these links (guest posts and web 2.0s) you should use a large variety of anchor texts, but focus on generic ones, with exact / partial match anchors sprinkled in here and there....

With regards to PBN links, you can point most of them to the homepage and use branded or exact match anchors (but branded is recommended)

And you can use other types of links (profiles, forums, UGC, .edu / .gov links, etc) with generic / naked URLs / partial match anchors...