Ok to funnel most juice through Power Page to money pages?

Sutra

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In my other thread I mentioned that I have a "power page" that links only to money pages. I'm updating that page significantly and going to acquire more links to it, so that way more juice is sent to the money pages. The reason I'm doing it this way is because I've found it easier to get links to this power page than it is to get links to the money pages.

I interlink on every article. Some links go to other standard articles on the site, some go to money pages, and some go to the power page. But I was wondering how I could power it up even more.

I have almost 400 articles on my site. If I were to go back and link them all to the Power Page (I'd still leave all the current interlinking intact though), would that give the money pages a boost? Would that negatively affect SEO at all?
 
This is a really interesting question, and it's something I've never tested or seen a case study for so I can't answer definitively but given how the whole pagerank model works (Matt Cutts waffles on about it here when it comes to loops and decay and so on plus some other irrelevant stuff about nofollow - https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/) I'd hypothesise that it would probably work. Whether it would be viewed ott/manipulative and put you at any risk is another question, of course.

Get More Power Pages

I'm fairly certain from years of doing linkable assets, with internal links to money pages, and building links to them for clients, that there is a diminishing return when all your links fire to one internal page to the point of skewing your link profile - ie having 10 'power pages' with 10 links each would be more useful than one with 100.

Probably not smart enough to have the right answer to why but I always figured that if you believe the 'random walk' analogy, then if you have 100 pages that have a lot of authority and mostly link to money pages, then it's much more likely the 'random walk' goes through those pages repeatedly.

It may even just be something that tweaked manually - a site that is repeatedly interesting might deserve to rank more than a site that has one interesting page...

Anyway I've seen a lot of success, even some super affiliates, from people where they built a lot of 'authority articles' and other things similar to your 'power page' concept and had links to those, very few links engineered backlinks to actual money pages, but lots of contextual links to money pages on those 'power pages' so you're definitely onto a winning strategy, I would just spread it out more.

General Interlinking


I would then include the power pages into your standard interlinking strategy so that they're linked to from places on the site that make sense logically.

There have been a lot of case studies now showing that maintaining your categories and interlinking within those as a priority (the 'cool kids' have started calling the overall process siloing even though it's been around for ages but that's the best thing to google if you want case studies and some limited data) is effective so if you've undertaken a more general cross-site interlinking strategy, I might revisit and tighten that up, while throwing a few sensible/natural ones to the power pages, especially if navigating to that page makes a lot of sense from a user point of view/getting more conversions by getting them from an information page to something more useful to you.

It would then appear less forced than if you just have all the links going to one 'power page' too as you'd have the opportunity to include almost all of your new ones very naturally somewhere on your site, as they'd be very relevant to individual pages - more so than a 'one size fits all' page.

But with all that said, I'd still believe you if you tested it and got a significant bump from doing that, as it seems to be something that should work based on what Matt said back in the day about the core, though heavily simplified, mechanics involved.
 
I wouldn't link from all 400 to the specific pages. That's overkill and might be seen as page rank flow manipulation. Penalties do go out for that. You might be a little more slick and work them into the sidebar as the most popular posts. That would be fine. I do that and it works well. Same with footer. Just watch the anchors. I like to use images, personally but you don't want 400 pages linked with your money term in-content style or even on the sidebar, even with them being internal. Ecommerce sites screw themselves like this all the time with sidebar breadcrumbs.

What I do for these money pages after publishing is search on my own site for very tightly relevant interlinking opportunities and I'll add about five with my various keywords as the anchors. This helps boost each ranking a bit after about a month. I will also go back and write more posts about the same topic from another angle to create a mini-relevancy net. Having links appear on NEWLY INDEXED posts is even more powerful than editing old posts, especially when hyper-relevant like this.

I might be trying to rank a post about "Cocker Spaniel Care" so I go write about:
  • Cocker Spaniel Care
    • Defending Your Cocker Spaniel From Fleas
    • Foot Pad & Nail Care for Cocker Spaniels
    • What's the Right Hair Length for Trimming Cocker Spaniels?
    • Should I Brush My Cocker Spaniel's Teeth?
    • I Kicked My Cocker Across the Room & It's Not Moving?

With juicy sites, this interlinking of old and then new posts is often all it takes to hit the front page even on medium difficulty SERPs. Add in a small number of off-site contextuals with the right anchors and you'll top 3 in 2 months.

Yes, this stuff you're talking about is the crux of scaling and ranking later on when it's all about pumping out content because your domain is already so juicy. You can overdo it though. 5 old articles and then 5 new articles plus 5 off-site articles should move you a TON. Do that and circle back around in 3 months and see if it needs another boost or not. In most cases it doesn't if you're choosing the right keywords.
 
I might be trying to rank a post about "Cocker Spaniel Care" so I go write about:
  • Cocker Spaniel Care
    • Defending Your Cocker Spaniel From Fleas
    • Foot Pad & Nail Care for Cocker Spaniels
    • What's the Right Hair Length for Trimming Cocker Spaniels?
    • Should I Brush My Cocker Spaniel's Teeth?
    • I Kicked My Cocker Across the Room & It's Not Moving?

This is a much better explanation of the siloing and stuff than what I said. I actually tested this recently on one of my sites to back up some previous tests we've done with the same results: one amazing one page guide vs a bunch of articles arranged this way, and so far the articles are winning massively despite getting way less links (both on the same site). The competition in the micro-niches isn't the same either... the batch of smaller articles in the form of a multi-page guide (silo) was actually in the tougher one.
 
Yea, you'll have diminishing returns for sure if you link to your power page from 400 other pages on your site.

If it were me, I'd probably stick with a couple dozen internal links (varying up the anchor text), and then focus on getting links from other sites to the power page and letting it trickle down (guest posts, editorials, etc...). You're going to have a much better return that way IMO.
 
Wowsers. I thought I replied to this already. Sorry about that!

Thanks for your help everyone. It makes a lot of sense and to prevent the diminishing returns and possible Google slap down the road, going to create multiple power pages as you recommended.

@Ryuzaki that kick the Cocker across the room line was awesome, haha.
 
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