Internal links question
-
I've read that Google frowns upon large numbers of internal links.
We're building a site that helps users browse a list of shows via dozens of genres. If the genres are expose, say, as a pulldown menu as opposed to a list of static links, and selecting the pulldown option filters the list of shows, would those genres count against our internal links count?
-
There were two initial reasons for the 100 link "rule."
1. Google's crawl budget was limited
2. Each page has a given amount of authority it is able to pass on to internal pages. Less links means more authority for each link.
The first part is out the door now. Google has plenty of crawl budget for most sites, and will give plenty if your huge website has enough authority.
So, the problem that you need to evaluate is if you are spreading your authority too thinly across all of these pages. Would you be better off limiting it to certain categories, or are you going to be a rock star at link building, and don't need to care?
After you consider that you will want to consider your users. Are you giving them too many options, and causing choice overload? Test different options, and see what performs better. There is a Ted talk about Choice Overload that used jelly as an example. One test had over 20 jellies to choose from, and one had around 6. At the end of the day people were more likely to actually buy the jelly when there were only 6 options. What the study determined was that having too many choices overwhelmed shoppers, and led to less sales.
Moral of the story, don't give people too much jelly.
-
Depends on what you are trying to do. If you have very little content, but a lot of links then they may frown upon it, frowning meaning take action against your site.
If you just have a large menu with a lot of links, and frequently link to other pages then I doubt it will be counted against you.
I understand trying to abide by Google guidelines, but it's much easier to simply look at your paqge and say "Does this make sense?" Am I trying to add links to manipulate search engine rankings, or am I trying to help users find helpful/relevant/related information? Once you look at it from that standpoint, it becomes easier to see where you have problem areas.
Since you are doing a genre based site, think of how you can organize your URL and menu structure, to make your articles easier to find, and link to. (I would imagine you want people to share your content, right?)
As long as your pulldown menus are linking to individual articles, even if the link count is high I dount think you will run into any issues.
-
Google has dropped the 100 links per page rule;
However, you only want to show links that are useful to the user. Look at your data and create an intuitive, easy to use navigation system and intra-linking architecture.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How Many Links to Disavow at Once When Link Profile is Very Spammy?
We are using link detox (Link Research Tools) to evaluate our domain for bad links. We ran a Domain-wide Link Detox Risk report. The reports showed a "High Domain DETOX RISK" with the following results: -42% (292) of backlinks with a high or above average detox risk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
-8% (52) of backlinks with an average of below above average detox risk
-12% (81) of backlinks with a low or very low detox risk
-38% (264) of backlinks were reported as disavowed. This look like a pretty bad link profile. Additionally, more than 500 of the 689 backlinks are "404 Not Found", "403 Forbidden", "410 Gone", "503 Service Unavailable". Is it safe to disavow these? Could Google be penalizing us for them> I would like to disavow the bad links, however my concern is that there are so few good links that removing bad links will kill link juice and really damage our ranking and traffic. The site still ranks for terms that are not very competitive. We receive about 230 organic visits a week. Assuming we need to disavow about 292 links, would it be safer to disavow 25 per month while we are building new links so we do not radically shift the link profile all at once? Also, many of the bad links are 404 errors or page not found errors. Would it be OK to run a disavow of these all at once? Any risk to that? Would we be better just to build links and leave the bad links ups? Alternatively, would disavowing the bad links potentially help our traffic? It just seems risky because the overwhelming majority of links are bad.0 -
INTERNAL LINKS strategy on our website
Hi Moz-ers, Currently doing an audit of our website. I have two questions on links. How can I see the current state of my internal links? Also, how can I improve our internal links on the website? what is a good framework to follow what should I avoid Thanks, looking forward to learning more on Moz!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_S
Eric0 -
Should we optimise our internal links?
Hi again, We recently had a technical search audit done by a specialist agency and they discovered a number of internal links that caused redirects to happen. The agency has recommended we update all of these links to link directly to the destination so we don't lose out on link equity. We'd just like to know if you think this would be a worthwhile use of our time. Our web team seem to think that returning a 301 to a crawler means that the crawler will stop indexing the original URL and instead index the redirected destination? Thanks all. Clair
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iescape2 -
Content Internal Linking ?
Should we internally link new content to old content using anchor tags (keywords) related to pages from all new blogposts or should be keep rotating the blogposts like link from some blog posts & not from others. What ratio should we maintain. Right now i keep 2 links maximum from a 300 words posts or 3 in 500 words posts maximum. But linking from each new blog posts will be good?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Internal Linking from Menu or body text or both with exact match keyword?
I used to have my menu link to every page with my exact match keywords. I am a Magician and have pages for each county / town so I had a link to /magician-hampshire with the anchor text Magician Hampshire in the menu. I recently had my website updated and the developer told me this was very spammy have a menu that said Magician Hampshire, Magician Surrey, Magician Berkshire He suggested that I should now have a menu structure that says Areas Covered>Hampshire - Surrey - Berkshire etc.Google will know my website is about a magician and relate the two together. Is this correct or should I revert my menu back to anchor text of Magician (County) I am running wordpress and he said the title attribute can say Magician Hampshire but the Visible text is for the user and not Google. I also use the technique of doing site:rogerlapin.co.uk magician hampshire and then seeing the top 10 pages google has for me and placing a text link from each of these pages in the body text. When doing link analysis I now see I have two links to each page but understand that google will only account for the first one (from the menu) Questions:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rnperki
Should I link to every main page from the Menu with the exact anchor text?
Does google only take into account the first link to a page it discovers?
Will it associate a link to a page with just the text of the county (Berkshire) to be related to Magicians in Berkshire as that is what the page is about? A few years ago I used to have at the bottom of each page Magician Hampshire | Magician Surrey | Magician Berkshire | Magician Sussex links - and to date a a lot of other Magicians employ this same technique. I was told google would slap them for it but so far it has not and it seems to be working for them. Many Thanks Roger http://www.rogerlapin.co.uk0 -
What to do when unique content is out of the question?
SEO companies/people are always stating that unique, quality content is one of the best things for SEO... But what happens when you can't do that? I've got a movie trailer blog and of late a lot of movie agencies are now asking us to use the text description they give us along with the movie trailer. This means that some pages are going to have NO unique content. What do you do in a situation like this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichardTaylor0 -
Looking for a link builder
Hey guys I'm looking for a freelance link builder to work with my agency. Any suggestions would be great. Thanks Jaime
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | flemingsteele0 -
Outgoing affiliate links and link juice
I have some affiliate websites which have loads of outgoing affiliate links. I've discussed this with a SEO friend and talked about the effect of the link juice going out to the affiliate sites. To minimize this I've put "no follows" on the affiliate links but my friend says that even if you have no follow Google still then diminishes the amount of juice that goes to internal pages, for example if the page has 10 links, 9 are affiliate with no follow - Google will only give 10% of the juice to the 1 internal page. Does anyone know if this is the case? and whether there are any good techniques to keep as much link juice on the site as possible without transferring to affiliate links? Appreciate any thoughts on this! Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ventura0