Case Studies
Case Study: External Linking
A publisher wanted to optimize a micro site, a subset of the overall main site where visitors went to find specific information and perform certain transactions. The search engines were sending almost no visitors to this group of internal site pages, and in fact the site's own home page was not sending a lot of traffic to its micro site, either, despite clearly marked global navigation links to the sub site.
Link research revealed that there were a respectable number of links pointing to the site-well over 30,000 in any case. But virtually all the links pointed to the home page. Almost no links came to any of the site's internal pages, including to the pages of the micro site.
How was this possible? There was a huge amount of high-quality content on the micro site, and press releases were sent out almost daily to announce new articles posted. But the links in every press release were simply the URL of the home page.
The publisher was doing a fair amount of social media and content sharing. Again, the links from social media sites utilized the home URL and not the URL of any of the relevant pages.
Part of the reason for this had to do with the fact that few of the site's internal pages had "clean URLs"-and there's more about clean URLs in Chapter 9 of Secrets of SEO for Publishers. But, whatever the reason, it was costing the publisher not only in terms of traffic to the micro site, but also in terms of site usability, as visitors were taken to a page that was not directly relevant to their interests.
There were many opportunities for SEO improvement of the micro site: clean URLs, keyword work, the site's internal linking structure, use of anchor text, and so on. But the single change that made the most difference was the re-structuring of the external linking policy to bring off-site links to the internal site pages.