Link Consolidation - Powering up Your Pages with Link Juice
There are certain things that need to be done at the beginning of every link building campaign. Most people will do proper keyword research and find proper landing pages, after that they might check competitors to see where they got their backlinks as well as to figure out which types of pages are most linked. That info can come along handy and can be used to implement a solid link building strategy. However, there is one more thing that is needed when starting a link building campaign and that is link consolidation.
There are two types of link consolidation, internal and external consolidation. Internal manages the flow of link juice to your most important pages and the external one manages the issues of your existing links that are not used to their full potential. So let’s go over the most important things to know about link consolidation.
Internal Consolidation
Rand Fishkin explained it well on SEOmoz, there you have a diagram that shows one part of the internal link consolidation. His diagram shows how you can consolidate link juice by pointing all of it to one large “about” page instead of several pages like testimonials, about us, contact, privacy and so on. This is very easy to understand, instead of breaking your link power into 4 or 5 pages you consolidate it and point it all to one single page that will in result have more power and more authority.
The thing is that this isn’t so good in practice, but this is just an example. If your pages were created with this in mind from the start there is no need to worry, and of course if you have a small number of pages it is irrelevant. But for large websites this is a real issue, especially with ecommerce websites that have dynamic URL’s which can cause duplicate content issues. In order to maximise your linking efforts you have three choices:
- Consolidating pages for more direct linking
- 301 redirecting certain pages to pass full link juice
- Canonical tag implementation
The first one we already covered, it is easy to understand. The 301 redirect is used mostly for root domains, but you can use the same for individual pages, although I do not recommend it. You will be easier passing along the link juice by implementing a canonical tag that will make your 3 new dynamic URL’s point to one and the original page you wish to rank.
The idea with all choices is to make your pages more valuable by feeding them with more link juice. Instead of linking to 100 of pages on your site you can bring that number to 50 or even less by carefully implementing internal link consolidation.
External Consolidation
External link consolidation is a regular practice with link building team. This is one of the first things we do when we start a link building campaign, just like scaling competitor links. The idea is to find mentions of your brand with no link and ask for it, or to change the already existing links to be more valuable for you. Here are the things you should always keep an eye out for:
- Brand mentions
- www vs no www links
- No anchor
- Nofollow links
- Brand images without a link
- Dead links with old pages
The first one we already mention, by creating alerts for your brand name you can easily see if someone is mentioning your brand name. Simply follow up on that opportunity and request a link, in most cases you will find that people that are already talking about you and your brand will gladly post a link.
If your 301 for the root domain is not in place you may have an issue with WWW vs non WWW links. Some people will link to your site like this: http://www.yoursite.com while other may link like this: http://yoursite.com
This can create a big problem for you as the link value is diluted and you have two pages gaining links instead of one, also this can cause duplicate content issues. So make sure to implement the most basic 301 for your root domain, but just in case contact the people linking to you and ask them to simply add or remove the WWW.
“No anchor” links are not always bad; we need a few for our link diversity. But if you wish to maximize your link building efforts by turning that “no anchor” link into an anchor text link of your choice you should pursue these opportunities. Most people will just link with the URL or your brand name, so by using Open Site Explorer or other tools that let you see the linking page as well as the anchor text you can easily identify these opportunities. The same goes for nofollow links, they are clearly seen in Open Site Explorer. Again, you need them, they add to your link diversity, but going after a few nofollow links from important sites that you think you can turn into dofollow links is a valid strategy.
This is a part that most people skip or never even think about it, pursuing your images scattered on the web. This can be hard, but there is a plugin called TinEye that lets you search images directly. You can right click on any image and tell this plugin to search for it. Once you find where your images are, you can ask the webmaster to give you attribution as you have the rights to that image. If he doesn’t you can request from him to remove the image, but we want a link, and this is one of the best ways to get links. So fire up your Photoshop and start making some branded images.
The last thing you need to do is look for your 404 pages and find links pointing to those pages. Contact the webmasters and ask them to link to your new pages with that content. In 99% of cases they will gladly do so.
Here is an action tip: investigate your competitor 404 pages, see what those pages were about using wayback machine or cache, create content like that and ask the webmaster that link to those pages to link to you instead.
By carefully managing link consolidation you can maximize every bit of your link power. Smart linking is very important, just throwing links here and there will get you nowhere, and this is a valid strategy to get some fast momentum at the early phase of the link building campaign.
Guest post by: Zac Grace works as advanced SEO strategist and link building team leader at Dejan SEO Company, a company providing specialized link building and SEO services for Australian market. You can connect with Dejan SEO on Twitter.
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