Link Sculpting in 2020 – How to Effectively Distribute it?
“May the lord give you ample link juice and the wisdom to distribute it wisely”
There is a moment in every internet marketer’s life when they need alternative and sophisticated strategies to work.
So what about it?
Link sculpting, when put, is “effectively distributing the ranking influence of the pages of your pages, within your site”.
Why should you do it?
Imagine a food server, who has 500 chicken nuggets and get orders for various portions. What you have to do next is prioritize the larger requests first (probably because you got their orders first) and then, probably start filling up the medium and the smaller ones and if they finish you call back up and ask for more.
Moral of the story, you need to prioritize the available resources to maximize your results.
Those of you new to the realm of internet marketing, link juice is the influence each page possesses. It is earned when some other page links to it. It gets passed when the page is having its links to some other page in-turn giving it it’s link juice.
It is one of the significant factors based on which, and a search engine ranks a particular page in its result page.
Link juice is a compelling resource and being an internet marketer I can guarantee that besides actually having ample of it, the ability to distribute it effectively is the need of the hour.
How should you do it?
Link Sculpting has come of age, and there was a time when marketers thought of putting a ‘nofollow’ on links to manipulate their page rank. Nevertheless, I am no more talking about the ‘nofollow’ yet talking about ‘Link Sculpting’. So here goes,
Redirecting links post they have lived there an age
What happens when one of your pages is old, yet it is pristine, considering the link juice it earned in its time. What do you with it now?
Let it remain there? And not pay heed?
Well, frankly there is much more to the old-timer that meets the eye. Did it occur to you to apply a redirect?
I remember when Harry Potter 5 was released, there was a frenzy amongst online book stores to make their outlet rank better.
The store which ranked top was which redirected the link juice of its Harry Potter 1 page to the 5th one.
Footer
Handling your footer links is a tricky affair. Here I will give you a choice between stuffing all your links into the footer whereas on the other hand could you categorize all those links into different titles and just put all title links in the footer?
Hint, do the link juice math, which option passes the least PR from a particular page? The latter would be the clear winner!
Navigation
How much time does it take for any user to reach any of your content? Believe if it is more than three clicks, I would seriously recommend that you work on the website navigation. When dealing with an e-commerce website, you need to put your product center and forward, because it will help you leverage on two factors:
- Crawl-ability
- Indexing
Understand the concept, and if your content does not get crawled, you can’t get it indexed. If it is not indexed, it can’t get ranked.
Internal linking from pages (blogs)
Blogs invite a lot of ranking attention since they are one of the easiest sources for natural backlinks. Now, what if you could link related blogs to your products or services page?
Would you think it would make a difference? I am sure once you have done that, there is no going back!
Archiving Old content – A must for large blogs!
This concept relates to an extent with navigability. You see when you pump content of a magnum amount. It keeps piling one over the other, and soon the material is buried one under the other. It hampers crawl-ability and indexing. By archiving old content pieces, maybe like chronologically, these would be much easier to crawl & be indexed, eventually enhance rankings.
The factors which also need to be taken care for effective Link Sculpting
Link Relevance
How cautious are you about outbound linking? Did you know, linking to a page of less relevance can diminish the linking strength of the page itself?
Eliminate Duplicity
Imagine a health insurance website, which manages insurance both by the product and by the state. A common scenario with the domains can be:
- www.xyz.com/florida/healthinsurance-I
- www.xyz.com/healthinsurance-I/florida
the two URLs would effectively have the same content which can be disastrous considering the duplicate content. Please tread with caution.
Link Sculpting is the way you arrange to prioritize your link juice, as per the importance of the pages in your current ranking context.
Let me know your thoughts by leaving a quick comment below.
Backlinks are incoming links to your website. It’s simple really…you vote for a candidate that you fully support or find most interesting. Similarly, you link to websites (or anything for that matter) that you think gives great value. As an SEO specialist, backlinks are one of the things you strive for in order to outrank your competitors.
(Nofollow links don’t give out “link juice” or “link love” which is used by Google for their PageRank system.)