These are some of the most painful questions asked by many website business owners and although we can completely sympathise with their concerns, it is not uncommon to find that sometimes they are not happy with the answers!

The truth is that the solutions to these problems often look easy on paper but implementing them is another matter entirely. Progress is most often hindered when the onsite implementation of action points can only be done by a third party web-development company.

So what are the biggest loopholes and reasons why website links and juice are lost, diluted or completely blocked from being indexed?

• Links based in JavaScript, Flash or Plug-Ins – Links embedded inside these elements are almost always inaccessible to spiders.
• Overly complex URLs ( e.g. five or more parameters in the query string)
• Session ID’s or user ID’s in the URL
• Temporary 302 Re-directs – This type of re-direct does not pass any link juice whatsoever.
• Links in submission forms – Some forms have certain elements like drop down menus and other complicated elements, like surveys, which make it very difficult for spiders to index.
• Links in internal search boxes – Spiders don’t perform searches to get content and this can result in thousands of pages on the web being completely inaccessible due to being hidden behind internal search box walls.
• Links in frames and I-Frames – these elements present complex structural problems for search engines.
• Links on dedicated pages with thousands of links – On average, the limit for search engines is 150 links per page, so this obviously causes some concerns. Preserve your link juice by using the rel=”nofollow” tag for the less important links and leave the high priority links to pass on link juice to the other pages of your site.
• Links to pages that are blocked by the commands in the Robots.txt file – Robots.txt files allow the webmaster to control and restrict spider access to certain pages that you don’t want to be indexed. Use this effectively to preserve your domain authority.
• Duplication and canonicalisation – Having more than one dedicated URL (e.g.; http://www.example.com/index.html, http://www.example.com/default.aspx etc…) for your site dilutes the amount of link authority and therefore dilutes the overall link juice that could be passed to your ideal domain URL – e.g.; http://www.example.com/
• Static and XML sitemaps – Not implementing these correctly could lead to valuable pages on your site not being indexed and therefore not contributing to the overall domain authority.

The first step in resolving these issues would be to identify the problems and then fix them. Ideally the best practice would be to keep these factors in mind when building your site up from scratch. When it comes to building a brand new site it is best to start out by creating a strong focus on architecture and linking structure. One of the best and most advised site structures, which can preserve both a strong information hierarchy and link structure, is  called a “stacked pyramids structure” as you can see from the image below.

Unfortunately most of us aren’t so lucky and only find these types of problems after the site has been built and running for a while. Lucky for us there is a little tool that is free to use and available to everyone: Google Webmaster Tools.

Google Webmaster Tools allows access to a wonderful variety of tools to troubleshoot the above mentioned problems. Once you have your site verified, navigate your way to the Crawl Errors Report.

The Crawl Errors Report is one of the most helpful tools and one of the primary reasons why Google Webmaster Tools is so helpful. Using this report will allow you to see which of your pages are giving errors and why, as well as solutions to your problems via the Webmasters Help Centre.

Use Google’s Webmaster Tools to spot loopholes that are preventing your site pages and keywords from ranking in the search engines and by doing so, you will successfully manage to preserve as much of your website’s authority and link juice.

Internal Linking serves multiple purposes:

1. To increase Page Rank of internal or ‘deep’ pages.
2. To build relevancy of a page to a keyword or key phrase.
3. To ensure that your site in its entirety is spidered, even those pages that are not referenced in your main navigation.

Increasing Page Rank of Internal Pages

Google allocates a value to every page of your site. For this they use Page Rank. Many refer to Page Rank as the “juice” allocated to each page and the website as a whole. Your homepage is seen as the most important page of your site and therefore the Homepage will always have the highest Page Rank value.  This Page Rank is then distributed between the lower pages of your site as illustrated in the image below:

The links that point from your home page to internal pages are usually found in the Main navigation of the site. This allows your Homepage Page Rank to flow naturally to the internal pages that are being linked to. The ‘juice’ gets distributed evenly across the pages that are being linked to.

Building Relevancy of a Page to a Keyword

The first and most important step of any successful SEO campaign is without a doubt Keyword Research. You have to have a very clear objective of which pages you want to rank for and for which keywords or phrases. When creating your internal linking structure you cannot just link to pages using any random text you feel like. You need to use the targeted keyword of the page you are linking to in your anchor text.

Links act like votes for the pages that they link to. So, if you link to a page using “click here” enough times, that page will start to rank for the keyword “click here” in the Search Engines. Go ahead and do a search for the poor guy who ranks NO 1 for “Click Here”!

Ensuring your whole site gets spidered and indexed

Making sure your website and all its pages are spidered by the search engines is in all probability the easiest thing you can do to increase your rankings. You see, the more pages of your site are indexed in the Search Engines the more content you have to offer the user. The more content you have on your site, the more keywords you will inevitably have in this content. And the more keywords you have the better the chances of ranking for those keywords.

So why would Search Engines not be able to spider all your pages without internal linking? Pages can be hidden from search engine spiders when linking is done in a way that the spider cannot read to follow those links. This would happen if your site uses a script-based navigation system for example. Also, image-based navigation may be crawlable or spiderable by search engines, but the search engines can’t see images and therefore can’t assign any relevancy from the image to the page that is being linked to.

Well that’s all I have for now. I hope you got all of that, but if you didn’t, don’t despair! Just give ROI Media a call and we’ll sort you out.