linkbuilding to startpage or subpage?

Hi,

I have a website with a startpage on that page it shows 2 images, one saying personal and one saying businesses, this landingpage shows up when you visit my url: www.url.com so when people click on either home or business thats where the actual website is and when clicking on home the url shows: www.url.com/home if clicking on the businesses image www.url.com/businesses. SO my question to you guys is, should i optimize and do linkbuilding to the startpage www.url.com or should I do link building to url.com/home for my keywords? does google give less value to subpages? it's hard for me to optimize the startpage as i don't whant to put any content in it, i want to keep it clean.

Appriciate any suggestions from you guys. Anyone with experiance with this kind of issue?

I would do some backlinking to the start page, but if it were me....I would really focus on the home pages of your site, since this is where your main content is displayed.

the subpages. Chances are, you wont change the content on your front page, and it'll be harder to rank than a page with content.

But do googl egive the same value to subpages as it does to the root page in terms of SEO? I read somewhere that G want to list startpages rather then subpages, so it rather lists www.domain.com then www.domain.com/subpage

I would build backlinks on the startpage rather than the /home. One day you may change the subpage. Also, in your case, you may design your startpage to select home or business by a simple ajax or javascript button, so the landing page will still be on index php where they will display different content when different buttons are selected. You may want to check that with your developer?

One real life story:

My biggest competitor creates backlinks with his plain URL or his shopname since years only to his mainpage. He never did any deeplinking, never ever. I created links mostly to the categories with the brandnames. The special market in our niche is now parted between us both ( we use to have high exclusive products, noone else has) and guess what? I am always second with that strategy. With his backlinks to homepage he has built much more authority as me with my high pr backlinks to categories and products.

so the conclusion would be to build backlinks to the plain url so: www.domain.com ?

I dont do it like this, but the conclusion would be yes, if you work really long term with the goal to build authority. But I have to say the mentioned site gets some deeplinks from blogs and forums, mostly without anchor tags.

subster said:

One real life story:

My biggest competitor creates backlinks with his plain URL or his shopname since years only to his mainpage. He never did any deeplinking, never ever. I created links mostly to the categories with the brandnames. The special market in our niche is now parted between us both ( we use to have high exclusive products, noone else has) and guess what? I am always second with that strategy. With his backlinks to homepage he has built much more authority as me with my high pr backlinks to categories and products.

Click to expand...

I have seen this go both ways. Ideally, you want a natural looking backlink structure which means you'll have more to your homepage than to internal pages, but your internal pages should also have deep links to them as well. Google is trying very hard to understand unnatural link structures and they are getting better at it. If all your high quality anchor text links are to your homepage, that might look odd.

I generally consider the anchor text when determining where to link. General or branded anchor text always goes to the homepage. Exact match or semantic links I split between my homepage and a related subpage. I've had excellent results with this method and never been hurt by Google updates (Panda doubled my traffic for a couple of niche sites).

Yeah, you are right. Sounds like an excellent strategy.

jibjabber said:

I have seen this go both ways. Ideally, you want a natural looking backlink structure which means you'll have more to your homepage than to internal pages, but your internal pages should also have deep links to them as well. Google is trying very hard to understand unnatural link structures and they are getting better at it. If all your high quality anchor text links are to your homepage, that might look odd.

I generally consider the anchor text when determining where to link. General or branded anchor text always goes to the homepage. Exact match or semantic links I split between my homepage and a related subpage. I've had excellent results with this method and never been hurt by Google updates (Panda doubled my traffic for a couple of niche sites).

Click to expand...

when you say that internal pages needs deeplinks what does that mean?
If I want to optimize plain url, should i from my subpages link back to the home page with anchors? I see some do it in the footer is that the way to go?

Kamoro said:

when you say that internal pages needs deeplinks what does that mean?
If I want to optimize plain url, should i from my subpages link back to the home page with anchors? I see some do it in the footer is that the way to go?

Click to expand...

That is what I do with the my websites.

Kamoro said:

when you say that internal pages needs deeplinks what does that mean?
If I want to optimize plain url, should i from my subpages link back to the home page with anchors? I see some do it in the footer is that the way to go?

Click to expand...

Internal Pages = Any page that is not the homepage (my definition, might be be everyone's def)
Deep Link = Link to any page that is not the homepage. again, my definition. Might not be universally accepted.

I'm specifically referring to links from external pages (not your site) to your site. For example, from site xyz, I might have a link with my brand name pointed to my homepage. Then have another link from site abc using exact match anchor text for my target keyword to another page on my site (not the homepage) which is targeting that keyword. Then I may have another link from site lmnop using a semantic match (i.e. yellow, amber, canary, gold, etc.) anchor text.

Footer links to your homepage aren't really necessary since you should have links to your homepage in your main navigation. Based on the first link rule (only the first href to a page passes pagerank), there isn't really a need for the extra link unless it is for user experience.