- Oct 9, 2013
- 3,116
- 12,591
A huge misconception I see all the time is people think that you send links to a page to rank it.
This is an old school way of thinking, and while you do get a slight benefit if you send some more links to a page, it's the wrong mindset.
One of the problems with hitting a page too hard is that the machine learning trained models see it as being user built/SEO'd link building and not real/natural.
The correct way to think of link building is this :-
"I am building links to my site to raise my overall site authority"
This means you plan out your link building to appear natural. You spread your links around to the types of pages that would naturally attract links, and less so to your highly commercial pages.
That doesn't mean you can't link to commercial pages. Just balance it out. If you send 20 links per month, do 7-10 to commercial pages and 10-13 to non-commercial.
The slight exceptions is if you're running a really big site and you have a few high competition pages. In these cases you can go a LITTLE harder to your higher comp pages, but you should have a lot of good links coming in every month that are spread around so it doesn't stand out. There's a big difference between sending 10-15 links to a high comp page when you have 50-60 overall contextuals coming in every month compared with sending 5 links to your commercial page when you are only building 5-8 links per month.
However, I still do recommend restraint even in those cases. I wouldn't do more than 5-6 links to 1 page if I was building 50-60 per month, and the vast majority of pages would just get 1 or 2 links.
So the core takeaway from this is..
Stop building links to rank pages.
Build links to raise your site authority.
If you want a specific page to rank, focus more on having enough site authority, topical authority and make sure the page is satisfying the user intent of the main keywords.
This is an old school way of thinking, and while you do get a slight benefit if you send some more links to a page, it's the wrong mindset.
One of the problems with hitting a page too hard is that the machine learning trained models see it as being user built/SEO'd link building and not real/natural.
The correct way to think of link building is this :-
"I am building links to my site to raise my overall site authority"
This means you plan out your link building to appear natural. You spread your links around to the types of pages that would naturally attract links, and less so to your highly commercial pages.
That doesn't mean you can't link to commercial pages. Just balance it out. If you send 20 links per month, do 7-10 to commercial pages and 10-13 to non-commercial.
The slight exceptions is if you're running a really big site and you have a few high competition pages. In these cases you can go a LITTLE harder to your higher comp pages, but you should have a lot of good links coming in every month that are spread around so it doesn't stand out. There's a big difference between sending 10-15 links to a high comp page when you have 50-60 overall contextuals coming in every month compared with sending 5 links to your commercial page when you are only building 5-8 links per month.
However, I still do recommend restraint even in those cases. I wouldn't do more than 5-6 links to 1 page if I was building 50-60 per month, and the vast majority of pages would just get 1 or 2 links.
So the core takeaway from this is..
Stop building links to rank pages.
Build links to raise your site authority.
If you want a specific page to rank, focus more on having enough site authority, topical authority and make sure the page is satisfying the user intent of the main keywords.