Google gives a lot of weight on anchor internal anchor tags. I made an experiment with a brand new site in a not very competitive niche. I made some keywords go up 60 positions on SERPS just by adding internal anchor tags between some pages.

Regards,
JF

Would that really work ? I had thought that Google would not give a lot of weight to links from the same domain ?

I agree with JF. Google does give weight to internal links. I am not a PR freak because I know that PR is nothing more to me than a few green pixels, but I too have run experiments on site wide relevant internal linking with almost no links pointing to those pages at all. (I would say totally, but there might be one here and there. ) What is interesting is that over a long period of time the PR for the couple of hundred pages never changed PR (most are a PR 5, but several are a PR 6.) What’s really interesting to me is that many of these pages went through a rank and tank phase and seem to have finally gained some kind of “trust” with Google serps. I am certain that serps will change, but for those pages I am referring to, I think one of 2 things may have occurred. Sandbox for subpages on an crusty old domain, or “no trust” in Google’s algo. Or perhaps it was both and my pages were rising and falling because they were relatively new at the time, but came out of the sandbox and gained trust? I guess I am stretching a bit, but I do agree that Google gives more weight on internal links. Another great post Aaron.

In my experience external links need to be involved on some level. Internal links can transfer that authority but the site cannot sustain relevance in a vacuum (that's probably stating the obvious, but I figured I'd mention it).

In my experience adding internal links is not relevant, you have to obtain external links from popular sites in order to increase the PR.

I have to disagree with the previous comments. Do you really think Google will not count internal links in their algo?

So, does that mean that they do not pay attention to the text you use in your navigation or the anchor text used on a link from one page to another?

I know this technique has been extremely overused by SEOs but it still works. Maybe you did a test with your small site and didn't see any good results, but for ecommerce sites with thousands (or million) of pages, using "smart" internal links between related products pages do help.

My test of internal anchor text was on a small site that had NO relevant external anchor text and the keyword phrases I was ranking for were not in the page title of the page that was ranking for a fairly competitive query.

And as of recently internal anchor text can count a bit more than most people give it credit for, IMHO.

Hmmm......then wont it be easily abused by webmasters who can just load their sites with internal anchor text for SEO.

Also, I wonder this can be considered as blackhat SEO.