Thanks so much!!!

That having been said, my personal experience with Google has taught me that, per their current algorithm and caeteris paribus (you said it was a law site...), internal linking is rewarded. If your site has a strong keyword theme (i.e., the target keywords are closely related and appear on multiple pages throughout the site), then the more internal links, the better. You can try to crosslink pages just within the text of each page, and/or you can utilize hidden links.

I know it's often strongly warned against, but "invisible" links using appropriately disguised 1-pixel images seem to work fine for reinforcing strong internal linking. By "appropriately disguised" I mean no HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes, names like "button-graphic-xyz" (as opposed to "invisible-1-pixel"), and even using a few different names so the Google indexing program doesn't see 30 graphics in a row, each entitled "link-graphic-1"...

If you don't want to risk the old 1-pixel GIF tactic, my understanding is that having just regular A HREF tags linking on nothing at all work fine as well, e.g.,

<A HREF="internal-link-49.html"></A>
<A HREF="internal-link-50.html"></A>
<A HREF="internal-link-51.html"></A>
Etc. ...

Another thing: the internal linking seems to work for clients' sites because of very consonant themeing, i.e., the keywords are all very related. In other words, I'm not sure that strong internal linking would do you much good if there wasn't some relationship among all the target keywords.

For example, if you're targeting keywords like "legal advice", "law advice", "lawyer help", "litigation information", I would guess that these terms are all considered closely related by Google's vector database. Therefore, crosslinking among four pages targeting these terms would reinforce the theme. On the other hand, if you were targeting "legal advice", "cheap lawyers", "bail money", and "appeals information", crosslinking among four pages targeting these terms wouldn't support any one theme too strongly (other than a vague "law" theme, I guess), so in such a circumstance crosslinking might not improve these pages' rankings. Again, I say "might not" because my experience has been with client sites with what appears to be strong themes, so the target keywords seemed somewhat closely related.

Good luck!

This isn't really a linking question... it's a content question.

I'm surprised that your site comes up under <used law books.> It doesn't come under <law books> because the phrase isn't used either in your site title or on the page. You do have <used case books> in your title and <law> on the page, which is probably why Google is picking you up at all. <Law books> is probably competitive enough that you've got to do a better job of optimizing your page.

Also, you have a framed site, and you've not put any searchable content in your noframes area. Check the frames forum on this, and do some reading either here or on Search Engine Watch on basic page optimizing.

[This message has been edited by Robert Charlton (edited 07-16-2001).]

Also, per Search Engine Watch's "Search Engine Features for Webmasters" table at http://www.searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/features.html, Danny Sullivan suggests that FAST and Excite are the only two of the top-tier SEs which can't spider through the FRAMES tags. Regardless, it's long been believed by SEO pros that Web developers should avoid implementing frames unless absolutely necessary (see Frederick Marckini's Search Engine Positioning, P.169, Wordware Publishing, Inc.), and my understanding is that this is still the commonly-accepted recommendation.

I would also agree that you should lose the frames.

I disagree with Winooski about hidden links however. I think they, like other tricks, should be avoided, but that's another discussion. Good luck!

[This message has been edited by Eathan (edited 07-19-2001).]