Julie Costello
In this week’s Q&A section, we have selected the following topic from our subscriber: “Should Backlinks Go to Homepage or Specific Page?”
Question From Andrew Markenzie
“Hi SEM team, I have a question regarding backlink. Should I build backlinks for the homepage or a blog post? Or if it’s need to be both, how much is the best ratio of backlink placement?”
Should Backlinks Go to Homepage or Specific Page?
There are two options for you in link building: either you can link to your homepage or you can link to a specific page.
However, there are one most common question that been asked around: which one is better for SEO performance? Is it homepage? Specific page? or Both?
Building link from high authority sites are hard and can be pricy. Therefore, deciding which webpage to target is important as you want to have optimal results from the money you spent.
First, let’s discuss the impact for each method.
A backlink that pointing to your homepage website will boost your site’s domain authority. Meanwhile, a backlink that pointing to any of your specific webpage will boost the page authority.
Domain Authority vs Page Authority
If you choose to focus on improving your site’s DA, it will boost the overall site’s authority and boost the other page as well.
In other word, backlink that pointing to your homepage will definitely benefit all the pages on the site.
If your website has super high authority, you’ll have some kind of VIP pass to rank high on SERP.
This explains why a new post from giant authority newspaper sites like Forbes and NYTimes can get top position on SERP in just one day.
Vice versa, improving your PA also can boost the DA as well, but with lesser impact to the overall site SEO.
However, placing backlinks that are pointing to your specific page will have better performance on that individual pages performance in SERP. Of course, this still depends on the backlink relevancy and type.
Killing Two Birds With One Stone
Based on above explanation, placing backlink in your homepage instead of specific page is like killing two birds with one stone.
So, does it mean placing link that pointing to your homepage is always better than specific page?
Surprisingly, no.
Let us explain the other impact on focusing too much backlinks on homepage instead of specific page.
If your website is relatively new and has very small traffic, it is better to focus building backlinks on a specific page instead of homepage.
When any of your specific page gain a top rank on SERP, you’ll gain tons of traffic and attract organic backlinks as well.
Other website will only link to you organically if you have a great content that they want to refer to and they feel it is useful for their readers.
When they find your specific page has a great content and appeared on top of SERP, nothing stop them to link to your site.
In the long run, the strategy of focusing backlinks on specific page is far more worth than focusing just with homepage.
It can save you lot of money by getting organic backlinks from other sites.
You can always combine the strategy of placing backlinks on both specific page or homepage, but it all depends on your budget.
If you have tight budget, we recommend you to just focus on building links on specific page.