Excessive internal links. Should I remove the footer links?
-
Hi guys,
I have an ecommerce site selling eco-friendly items online. I ran some on-page optimisation reports from SEOMoz PRO and discovered that I have at least 120 internal links per page.
32 of these are in the footer, designed in part to aid user navigation but perhaps also to have a positive impact on SERPs and SEO in general for the ecommerce site.
Will removing these links be beneficial to my search engine rankings, as I will have less than 100 internal links per page?
Or is it a major change which may be dangerous for my site rankings?
Please help as I'm not sure about this! I've attached an image of the footer links below. I won't be removing the Facebook/Twitter links, just the 3 columns on the left.
Thank you,
Pravin
-
Hi Pravin, I wouldn't consider 120 to be overly excessive for an ecommerce site. However there's a danger that the footer links could be perceived as spammy (especially if the anchor text is keyword stuffed). I agree with Bryan - check to see if the links are getting clicks, and if they're not, streamline or cut them. Good luck!
-
Hi Pravin,
That is a good question many people have.
Like most things SEOMoz informs you about you should take it as a very important suggestion, but not necessarily the absolute rule.
Here is a direct quote from Matt Cutts
REF: MattCutts.com"But in some cases, it might make sense to have more than a hundred links. Does Google automatically consider a page spam if your page has over 100 links? No, not at all. The “100 links” recommendation is in the “Design and content” guidelines section, and it’s the Quality guidelines that contain the things that we consider webspam (stuff like hidden text, doorway pages, installing malware, etc.). Can pages with over 100 links be spammy? Sure, especially if those links are hidden or keyword-stuffed. But pages with lots of links are not automatically considered spammy by Google."
In my 8 years of building e-commerce website I would say more then 100 links is actually the norm. My personal rule of thumb for e-commerce sites is to keep it around 200 in special cases where have more links is user beneficial I will allow for it. Just remember if you make a kick butt home page and get a high pagerank for it 5+ then you put 200+ links on it, you have diluted the value of each link to almost nothing, so design accordingly.
-
Google has declared war against the practice of excessive internal linking - which is why SEOmoz warns you about these excessive links within its tools.
Is it going to get you de-indexed? Maybe not. But as Google comes down harder on these practices it could certainly affect your ranking.
Having links for navigation is recommended, but taking up 1/3 of the page with footer links is obviously not benefiting the end user.
-
It's debatable these internal links seem like they are here for the user, I would check to see if these buttons get any clicks, if they dont you might not need them. Here's a recent WBF that should help: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Canonicals from sub-domain to main domain: How much content relevancy matters? Any back-links impact?
Hi Moz community, I have this different scenario of using canonicals to solve the duplicate content issue in our site. Our subdomain and main domain have similar landing pages of same topics with content relevancy about 50% to 70%. Both pages will be in SERP and confusing users; possibly search engine too. We would like solve this by using canonicals on subdomain pointing to main domain pages. Even our intention is to only to show main domain pages in SERP. I wonder how Google handles it? Will the canonicals will be respected with this content relevancy? What happens if they don't respect? Just ignore or penalise for trying to do this? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
How Google's "Temporarily remove URLs" in search console works?
Hi, We have created new sub-domain with new content which we want to highlight for users. But our old content from different sub-domain is making top on google results with reputation. How can we highlight new content and suppress old sub-domain in results? Many pages have related title tags and other information in similar. We are planing to hide URLs from Google search console, so slowly new pages will attain the traffic. How does it works?
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Links to category pages unnatural?
If people are linking to your site, it would seem natural that the vast majority of those links would point to the homepage, product page, or a article/content page. Let's say you have 100 links pointing to your site, and 40 of them are pointing to category pages. Would this seem unnatural? Does Google or other search engines have a way of determining this as a factor in ascertaining whether the links are natural or not? Is there a rule of thumb when it comes to the pages that are linked to on your site?
Algorithm Updates | | inhouseseo0 -
If our link profile is too "blog link" heavy, will that be all that bad?
We own a site that lends itself extremely well to getting boat loads of links, only down side is that those on the boat are all bloggers. We are selling a product that retails for $6.89 per unit. They are for women. Our target market is any woman/girl who is between 14 and 50. Even better, our cost per unit is only about $0.40. So what we've been doing is sending them out by the hundreds to legit fashion blogs all the way down to blogspot mommy bloggers and the reviews have poured in, literally all of them positive. Moral of the story, we have a good product, and no shortage of bloggers that would be willing to write us up a legit, human written (by a red-blooded American none-the-less) on almost exclusively legit blogs. We're not trying to manipulate what they say, how they link to us, what anchor text they use or anything. We're just sending them product, asking that they do a review and give us a link and that's it. Our worry is that given the nature of the site and the product offering, it's going to be easy to get these legit blog links, but more difficult to get links that "aren't on blogs". Is this going to hurt us, or will Big Google be kind and realize this isn't shady manipulation. It's legit part of our ongoing effort to get the word out. Further evidence that our campaign isn't to manipulate (although we all know we're in it for the links) is that so far 75% of our sales have been driven by these reviews. A few of the bigger sites that have done reviews have each directly resulted in 10+ sales from that single review. So what are all ya'll's thoughts? I suspect we'll be OK, but wanted some others to provide their views.
Algorithm Updates | | AarcMediaGroup0 -
Importance of Links for Local Search
**According to an article about the "no no's for local SEO" links are not very important. Here is an excerpt: "**Local SEO is very different when compared to traditional SEO. The importance of backlinks in local SEO isn’t as important. In other words, links simply don’t matter as much when it comes to local SEO. Googles’ local search algorithm treats links completely differently than its standard algorithm." How accurate is this statement? Wouldn't more links help your local pages rank better in non-local organic results such as the results outside of the new carousel?
Algorithm Updates | | pbhatt0 -
Sitemap link in footer?? Is it needed
Hi, I know sitemap is important to have as it tells google the pages to crawl. I have an xml sitemap for google to crawl. However, Do I need a sitemap link in footer. Any thoughts?? Does it have any harm if I dont include a sitemap link in footer
Algorithm Updates | | pejman500 -
Does Link Exchanges and Reciprocal Links Is Dead - Now Days ?
Hello, As we know randfish Rand discusses the egress of old link building practices and the ingress of new (old) link _earning _strategies, Rand has also discussed on Link Exchanges and Reciprocal Links, I have few questions which r related to Link Exchanges and Reciprocal Links. Few Question **1) Does Now Days Reciprocal Links Are Important Or Not For Link Building Strategies. ** ** 2) Webmaster Has To Perform Reciprocal Links Or Not.** 3) Can Reciprocal Links Boost Search Engine Ranking. 4) Does Reciprocal Links Has Negative Impact On Search Engine. Regards,
Algorithm Updates | | sumit60
Sumit0 -
Google removing pages from Index for Panda effected sites?
We have several clients that we took over from other SEO firms in the last 6 months. We are seeing an odd trend. Links are disappearing from the reports. Not just the SEOmoz reports, but all the back link reports we use. Also... sites that pre Panda would show up as a citation or link, have not been showing up. Many are these are not Indexed, and are on large common Y.P or other type sites. Any one think Google is removing pages from the Index on sites based on Panda. Yours in all curiosity. PS ( we are not large enough to produce quantity data on this.)
Algorithm Updates | | MBayes0