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Can there be too many links to your home page?
In an online webmaster forum, a webmaster described the
link experiment that he did with his websites. He tried to
find out how linking to the home page affected his rankings.
What did the webmaster test?
The webmaster tested the effect of links from sub pages
of his website to his home page. He tried links to the
home page of his website from the navigation and from the
content and he tried links with and without keywords.
The test was done with a 4 year old domain name with a
dedicated IP address. The web pages were HTML only. The
website ranks top 5 in Google for its main, second and
third keyword phrases and it has a total of 90 pages with
unique content.
What were the results of the test?
It seems that too many links to the home page of your
website can have a negative effect on your rankings:
- Linking to the home page from every page in the content
with the same keyword caused a six pages drop in rankings
(-6 pages).
- Linking to the home page from every page in the content
using keyword variations caused a three pages drop in
rankings (-3 pages).
- Linking to the home page from the navigation with "main
keyword" also caused a six pages drop in rankings
(-6 pages).
- Linking to the home page from the first 10 pages listed
on Google.com for "site:domain.com/*" increased
the ranking from 5th to 3rd (+2 positions).
The webmaster also observed the following:
- Linking from the content using keyword variations was
effective to a point, after which the rankings dropped.
- There seems to be a page threshold. If the number of
pages that link is even slightly above the threshold,
the rankings will drop.
Does this mean that you shouldn't link to your home
page?
It's hard to tell whether the results of this experiment
are valid because there are too many other variables that
influence the rankings of a web page.
It doesn't sound sensible that Google will downrank a
web page that has a link to its home page on every page.
Most users expect a link to the home page on every page
of a website and even Google has a link to its home page
from every page.
As Google's usual webmaster advice is to focus on the
website user, it seems implausible that Google would penalize
home page links.
We think that it's more likely that the ranking drops
are caused by Google's change filter. If you change your
web page contents, Google will temporarily downrank your
web pages. This has been described in a Google
patent.
High positions on Google depend on much more than the internal
links on your website. If you want an analysis of all important
factors that influence the position of your website on Google, analyze
your site with IBP's Top 10 Optimizer.
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