📘 This article explains evaluating internal links and Pagerank indicators in Botify reports.
Overview
Search engine robots prioritize which pages to explore based on several criteria, primarily popularity measured by usage criteria and Pagerank. Internal linking and Internal Pagerank make some pages stand out, as in a 3D map. Few incoming links and low Pagerank signal to search engines that these pages are not very important to be considered in the rest of the indexing and ranking process. Low Internal Pagerank also means users are less likely to find the page when navigating the website. That is why Internal Pagerank, or how link juice flows in your website, is a key indicator.
Two structural indicators impact the Internal PageRank:
Page depth: If a page is deep in the website structure (i.e., many clicks away from the home page using the shortest path), it receives very little internal "link juice" or Internal Pagerank. Minimize the average page depth (visit SiteCrawler's Distribution report to find the average), and check depth per page type to ensure important pages are not too deep. The goal should be to have most pages no deeper than four or five clicks from the home page.
Incoming links: If a page receives very few links compared to other pages, the website's internal linking structure indicates the page is unimportant, even more so if it receives links from pages with a low Internal Pagerank.
About Internal Links
Links on a website can be grouped into inlinks and outlinks:
Inlinks are incoming links pointing to a page from other pages on the website.
Outlinks are outgoing links, or links in the page pointing to another page.
In the example below, Page A has three Inlinks (from Pages B, C and E) and four Outlinks (to Pages D, E, F, and G).
About Follow/Nofollow Inlinks and Outlinks
Follow links are links that search engine bots will follow on your website to discover other pages and compute Pagerank flow. Follow links need not be specified using an HTML attribute or meta tag.
Nofollow links may still be crawled by search engines, but will be excluded in the calculation of Pagerank. Nofollow links can be defined in the link itself via a rel=nofollow link attribute, or in the page's <head> section, via a nofollow meta tag, which signals to search engine bots that no links on the page should pass Pagerank.
The number of Follow Inlinks is an indication of link juice flowing to a page, while the number of Follow Outlinks is an indication of link juice flowing out of the page (to other pages on your website, through Internal Follow Outlinks or to external websites, through External Follow Outlinks).
Viewing the Average Number of Follow Inlinks
To find how the overall volume of internal links on your website is distributed among all pages from the perspective of pages that receive the links, navigate to the Average Number of Follow Inlinks chart in the SiteCrawler Inlinks report:
Each point on the line represents 1% of all analyzed pages, so on a website with 100,000 pages, each point on the line would represent 1,000 pages. The value displayed is the average number of follow inlinks for these pages. In the example below, 47% of pages on the website receive a single incoming link on average (some can receive none if they can only be found via a redirect or an incoming canonical tag):
8% of all analyzed pages (the 67th to 74th percentiles) receive an average of six follow incoming links:
And 1% of analyzed pages (top percentile), receive an average of 6,987 follow inlinks.
To see pages receiving the highest amount of follow incoming links, click to get all URLs in the top percentile:
This shows how many follow links the top pages receive, which is usually much higher than the average for the top percentile.
Ideal Distribution of Follow Inlinks
Ideally, you should look for the following in the Average Number of Follow Inlinks chart:
Only a very small proportion of pages receive very few links. Internal inlinks are a good predictor of organic rankings since they indicate to search engines how important a page is in the context of the full site. It is very unlikely pages with few internal inlinks will generate organic traffic.
A relatively smooth progression from left to right, whether the shape is linear or includes some steps. Avoid a site structure where every page on the site is linked to an equal number of times.
The right part is not too steep, and not too high compared to the rest. The graph's scale is logarithmic, so if the last portion of the line is almost vertical and quite long, a very small proportion of pages receive many more links than the rest.
Although it is normal for some pages to receive more links than others, the distribution is not ideal when the difference between the top linked pages and the rest is too great. The following example shows a site with a less-than-ideal linking structure. More than half of all analyzed pages receive no more than two follow incoming links, while 1% of pages receive an average of 7,000 inlinks each:
In another example, the distribution of follow incoming links on this site is much better.
About Internal Pagerank
Internal Pagerank in Botify is computed considering only pages in your analysis scope (i.e., pages crawled by Botify). Pagerank outside of Botify is used by search engine algorithms, which consider the context of the entire web that they have visibility over.
Internal Pagerank in your Botify reports is a calculated metric that considers how your website's Pagerank is distributed within your website. It is a function of the number of internal follow links pointing to a page (i.e., inlinks), and the calculated Pagerank of the pages where the links come from. For example, a link from the homepage of an e-commerce site pointing to a product page will carry much more Pagerank than a link coming from another product page, since the homepage is typically linked to from every page on the website.
Botify reports can help you identify where Pagerank is concentrated on your website, and check whether certain segments or pages receive too much, or too little Pagerank. Ideally, Pagerank should be distributed among your website’s pages in a way that prioritizes strategic pages and de-prioritizes informational or unimportant pages.
Internal Pagerank information can be used:
To evaluate Pagerank by page type: Find out which pages have a high or Internal Pagerank and check if Internal Pagerank is concentrated on your important pages.
To prioritize corrective actions related to other indicators: For instance, when correcting HTTP errors, prioritize pages with high Internal Pagerank.
As criteria for corrective actions: For instance, when trying to increase search engine crawls, select pages to optimize based on Internal Pagerank and their number of outgoing links to ensure the new links to these pages will bring a significant amount of Internal Pagerank.
To make other indicators more meaningful: For instance, when evaluating "link juice" that goes outside your website, look at pages with a high Internal Pagerank combined with their number of outgoing links to external websites.
Viewing Internal Pagerank Information
To find the distribution of Internal Pagerank by segment, navigate to the Internal Pagerank by Dimension chart in SiteCrawler's Distribution report:
Also view Internal Pagerank by page depth since it typically decreases with depth:
Cross-referencing this information to the volume of pages by depth in the Indexable/Non-indexable URLs by Depth chart shows a small number of pages retains most Internal Pagerank:
Customizing Reports with Internal Pagerank Fields
Internal Pagerank is also available as a filter and URL Explorer report column, through the following fields:
Internal Pagerank: A score between 0 and 10, with one decimal. As it is not dependent on the number of pages in the analysis, it can be used to compare pages between different websites.
Internal Pagerank Position: Ranking among all analyzed URLs, based on the Raw Internal Pagerank. A page with an Internal Pagerank position of 1 is the page on your site with the highest Raw Internal Pagerank.
Raw Internal Pagerank: The individual Pagerank value used by Botify to calculate the Internal Pagerank and the Internal Pagerank Position (which are more human-readable metrics). It is the percentage of Internal Pagerank received by a page, so the sum of the Raw Internal Pagerank values for all pages in the analysis is 1. This also means that Raw Internal Pagerank can be summed up for a subset of pages to indicate how much Internal Pagerank a website section receives (while an Internal Pagerank average or Internal Pagerank Position average would not be meaningful).
Relationship of Incoming Links to Internal Pagerank
The number of incoming links is a factor in calculating Pagerank, but it does not necessarily correlate directly. A page that receives a single link from the homepage of a website could have a higher Internal Pagerank than a deep page in the site that receives many links from other deep pages since those have much less Internal Pagerank to distribute.
Comparing Internal Pagerank Scores
Looking at Internal Pagerank scores across pages, every point higher in Internal Pagerank indicates a ten percent increase. For example, a page with an Internal Pagerank one point higher than another (e.g., 9 vs. 8) has roughly ten times more Internal Pagerank than the other page.
Identifying Wasted Internal Pagerank
Links to external websites or pages that were not analyzed can waste your Internal Pagerank. To find out what proportion of Internal Pagerank is wasted, navigate to the Internal Pagerank Waste chart in the Outlinks report: