Internal Linking - Don’t Overlook The Power Of It
Wow, how long since I’ve posted anything in here! Okay, I’ll start where I left off, Blog vs Static HTML site. Hang in there cos this one is interesting. I didn’t log all of my test results here but the outcomes were clear, and I done quite a few of them. If you throw up a Wordpress blog on your domain, it leaves the static html site standing. Not just by a bit but typically hundreds of places behind in the serps. Since doing my tests I have pretty much used WP on all of my new sites. But don’t stop reading here, there’s more to it.
Anyway, in one of the tests from 2008 I wanted to test a few things all at the same time. I chose one main key phrase with about 40k searches a month and bought the .net, .org, .org.uk, .co.uk. I then done the same with hosted wordpress and blogger. This is what I ended up with, all the same identical keyword in the domain name.
Keyword.net - static html
Keyword.org.uk - WP
Keyword.co.uk - WP
Keyword.org - WP
Keyword.wordpress.com
Keyword.blogger.com
On each of those sites I created similar but unique content, nothing spun, all roughly the same keyword density etc. All of these sites were about as identical as you could get without being duplicate but some had more word count than others. The skinniest of the lot was the .co.uk version with a single page of around 200 words. The wordpress.com had two pages of content at around 500 words total, the .org.uk and blogger both a single page about 300 words. Although I didn’t throw up any useless information on any of them, I did make the .net site the best of the lot, Informative, useful, three pages of content, about 1200 words on the main page and all round spent some time doing a good job with it. The test was simple, make a decent informative site on static html and compare with wordpress versions that were very basic and although not spammy, they weren’t very informative sites. The result? The (best) site, static html didn’t get a look in. Neither did the Blogger site.
I’m not going to bother giving detailed stats but basically, the three WP sites on my own domains all hung around 400th position on google.com for the first month. The WP site hosted at wordpress.com went to about 100th and the blogger.com didn’t get indexed. The html site got indexed but was nowhere in the serps. All sites had a small but equal amount of backlinking.
Roll on a few months. Blogger finally indexed but nowhere in serps. The three domains and the wp hosted site all clung closely together and ended near the end of the first 100 on google.com. They stayed there for a while. The html site struggled to get into the 300’s. I threw more backlinks at it (about 80 or so) and done some article links at the main article sites. After about four or five months I stopped monitoring them. The blogger.com still nowhere, the other three all around 90 and the html site still towards the latter part of the 300’s despite the backlinking and it never got any better.
Now here’s the good part. A few months ago (about 18 months later) I decided to try and get some adsense revenue on the html site so I added about eight pages of content and interlinked them all wikipedia style. A few days later I checked to see if any of the new pages had got indexed and guess what … The site was at position 11 on google.com and it’s still in the top twenty now, a few months later.
Since then I ran a few tests and discovered something very important. The reason wp blogs get so much better positions is because of the amount of pages and internal linking. Forget duplicate content. If you do a site: search on a two page wp blog that’s using categories and tags, you will find you have about seven to ten pages indexed, all pointing to your home page. Even the login page is indexed. When you build a html site, one page is one page and that’s it. As soon as you create more pages and link them, the seo power sky rockets. Remember, I threw about 100 links at this site and they moved it from the 400’s to the 300’s. How many more links would I have needed to get it to position 11? Who knows, but eight pages of content did!