Too Many Internal Links?
-
Hi Guys,
I'm completing a overhawl of our website at the moment have a certain penguin killed our site for our main keyword.
I'm currently working on our internal linking as most of our blog posts have a link back to our home page with the main money keyword.
At present we have 3,331 internal links and our site has only 1,000 pages.
Can you get penalised for having too many internal links with exact match anchors.
Thanks,
Scott
-
Hi Scott,
Let me be very specific about what we're talking about. To be clear, no you can't get penalized for too much internal exact match anchor text, but you can hurt your rankings.
It's very common to have site-wide internal anchor text on your website, all with the same anchor text, all pointing to the same page - especially if it's in the navigation. For example, SEOmoz has literally 100,000 links pointing to it's tools page with the anchor text "research tools"
That said, it's best to vary your anchor text the best you can, and be careful where you place it. Sitewide anchor text in your footer is probably the least valuable spot (and potentially the most harmful) followed by the sidebar and header. The best anchor text is often editorial links within the main text body, using natural, non-repeating phrases.
Hmmm... now that I read your question again, it probably does look unnatural if every blog post has the same anchor text in it, pointing to your homepage. Best to clean that up.
And check out this latest Whiteboard Friday on internal linking.
Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!
-
Internally linking to the homepage is best practice, if anything.
Penguin related problems arise where there are keyword stuffing issues, or anything else that could be seen as webspam.
As well as looking at your internal link profile, it might also be a good idea to check out your use of keywords on the /main money' keyword!
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
-
Internal Linking issue
So i am working with a review company and I am having a hard time with something. We have created a category which lists and categorizes every one of our properties. For example a specific property in the category "restaurant" would be as seen below: /restaurant/mcdonalds /restaurant/panda-express And so on and so on. What I am noticing however is that our more obscure properties are not being linked to by any page. If I were to visit the page myurl.com/restaurant I would see 100+ pages of properties, however it seems like only the properties on the first few pages are being counted as having links. So far the only way I have been able to work around this issue is by creating a page and hiding it in our footer called "all restaurants". This page lists and links to every one of our properties. However it isn't exactly user friendly and I would prefer scrapers not to be able to scrape all properties at once! Anyway, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Sitemap links
Hi, I´m running a sitemap using pro-sitemaps and I find several pages that shouldn´t be listed. How do I find how are these pages being generated? Can´t find the links the robot is following to get to those pages..
Technical SEO | | ceci27100 -
Links from Instructables.com?
This is a silly newbie question. But will posting on www.instructables.com with some valuable content and url link back to my site help with "linking"? Or do they put a no-follow on all links on their site? Thanks for answering! Ron
Technical SEO | | yatesandcojewelers0 -
How to find an internal link that is generating a duplicate
Hello Mozers Can anybody help me. It's a bit OCD, but, I really want to find the internal links within a clients site that are generating duplicate urls. I did start looking page by page using search, but got a bit stir crazy! I'm sure one of you smart SEO's will have a simple, clever solution:) Thanks Catherine
Technical SEO | | catherine-2793880 -
Why doesn't SEOmoz see internal/external links on my site?
My SEOmoz analysis that my site contains neither external or internal lnks. I have used other tools and they have all seen the internal and external links on the pages. There aren't many but they are there. Why isn't SEOmoz seeing them?
Technical SEO | | iain0 -
Linking root domains and youtube
All of my competitors have high linking root domains from youtube and our isn't showing up although we have 1.5 million views to youtube. I tried adding our URL to the videos but it hasn't recognized as a linking root domain. What should I do?? There's a ton of SEO juice here I want to tap into! watch?v=GTXFRTY4CCA&list=UUOcfF9LAHKedNSyk-gk5xDw&index=28
Technical SEO | | tonymartin0 -
Internal Linking
Hello there, I own a "how to" website with 1000+ articles, and the number of articles is growing every day. Often some articles are easier to understand if I link a certain step to an article that was written before, because that article explains the step in more detail. Should I use "read here/read more" or the "title of the article I'm referring to" as anchor text? When is internal linking too much? Should I use nofollow?
Technical SEO | | FisnikSylka0 -
No inbound links. Should I link-build or create new content?
I have a PR4 site with good traffic but the blog is not very popular--the posts do not generate any backlinks and hardly get any traffic. Yet, I continue to kick out a new post every week. Site: http://www.stadriemblems.com/
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept
Blog: http://www.stadriemblems.com/blog/ I keep posting content so that Google keeps crawling the site and viewing it as fresh (and yes, I'm posting for my human visitors' benefit too!), but I'm wondering if eventually this will hurt more than help if Google detects all these new pages are not being linked to, and therefore starts viewing the site as low quality and devalues it. So should I: Keep posting Stop posting and build links to the posts Try to promote my blog to get more traffic and hope people link to it Something else or some combination of the above0