Should I have as few internal links as possible?
-
On most pages of my site i have a Quick Links section, which gives x3 cross sales links to other products, a newsletter sign up link, link to Blog, x4 links from images to surveys, newsletters, feedback etc.
Will these links be hurting my optimal SEO juice between pages, should the number of internal links be kept to a minimum?
My site is www.over50choices.co.uk if that helps.
Thanks
Ash -
That sounds like a good compromise solution to just show the main pages reducing the links substantially whilst maintaining an effective customer experience
Thanks Oli
Ash
-
I would agree with Takeshi that in this instance, a mega menu may not be the best option.
Contextual navigation is really what you should be after. That is a bit of a buzzword though, so I'll explain what I mean in more detail. In simple terms, contextual navigation means only showing navigational elements that you can deduce a user is interested in. This works both ways, in that you also shouldn't 'jump the gun' and show them links just in case they may want them..
To use an example from your site - if we hover over 'money'. There are 6 main sections, and all of the sub-pages from each of these sections also have links on the hover menu.
If you would like to move more towards the SEO side of the trade-off, why not remove the sub-page links? This would drastically reduce the number of internal links that appear on every page.
At a quick glance, the nav menu would go from several hundred links, down to 37. I feel there would only be a minimal loss in navigability doing this, because you also have a contextually based side bar menu. Some people believe that mega -menu's are worse for navigability, because it overloads the user with choice. Again I think that labelling something as good or bad (it is all situational), but depending on your situation and point of view it may even improve things!
An even bigger step towards the SEO side of the trade-off would be to remove the drop down menu entirely, and use 'hub pages'. For example, by this I mean that the actual 'Funeral Planning' page would be the primary method of navigating through to the 6 main sections. This would mean that the top nav consisted of only 7 links. Remember though, that depending on your goals, this may be a little too far in the SEO direction because it would make navigation a little more complex (a user would have to click a couple of times before getting to the desired section).
Use your knowledge of the big picture of the business to decide what is best - a slightly better navigation vs more tightly controlled link juice!
Oli
-
I'm personally not a fan of mega menus (this article explains why), but I think it can be OK on the homepage. It becomes more problematic on the inner pages, however. If someone is in the "Energy" section of your site, they don't need to be able to get to every page of the "Funeral Planning" section. So if you can make the menus more contextual based on what section of the site the user is on, that will provide the best experience for users, preserve link equity, and improve topic relevance.
-
Hi Oli thanks for your answer.
With the site only 6 months old and looking for as much help with rankings i wonder whether i should ditch the mega menu in favour of more google juice?
With only c300 pages & 6 core categories, navigation is easily accessible from the top nav.
I agree its a balance!
Thanks
Ash
-
Hi Takeshi thanks for your response.
For our site of our size ie c300 pages do you think that the "mega menu" is not necessary and will help improve juice flow throughout the site?
Thanks
Ash
-
Yes, try to reduce the number of links you have on all your pages while maintaining a good user experience. Contextual navigation is a great way to achieve this. For example, if someone is exploring the "Energy" section of your site, then they probably don't need 50 links about "Funeral Planning".
Try to keep the links in the nav relevant to the section of the site they are on, while providing access to the top level categories if the user wants to visit a different section. This will reduce the number of links on the page, and also improve the keyword relevance of each of the individual categories.
-
This is an interesting question, and one that I looked into fairly recently.
A simplistic answer to your question would be that yes, more internal links will distribute link juice across your site much more evenly, like so: Home page (100%) -> 25 internal links (4% each). As opposed to something like: Home page (100%) -> 4 internal links (25% each).
However, to truly answer this question there is a bit more detail involved.
As with most things in web design, there is a trade-off. For example, take a concept like the mega-menu navigation you are currently using (i.e. a menu with loads of links in a drop down). There is an argument to say that mega-menu's are solid from a usability point of view, most particularly for e-commerce sites. This is because there is a vast amount of products to sift through, and getting to the one you want in as few clicks as possible is quite important.
The trade-off for using a mega-menu, in my opinion, is that it is quite poor in terms of link juice optimisation. This is because the Google algorithmn 'sees' the links from every single drop down as a live internal link - regardless of the hover effect.
In your 'funeral planning' drop down alone, there are 53 internal links that appear on every page. Essentially, every page on your website is linking to every other page, so the link juice is spread evenly. At a guess you have at least 300 internal links on the home page, which would translate to 0.33% of link juice per page.
- Please note this is a massive over simplification, because the algorithmn weights the links differently due to position. See #5 here on the following link (also bear in mind the date of the article!): http://moz.com/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links
- Also, a portion of link juice is 'lost' when passed, to prevent an infinite loop. An estimate is that a page only passes 85% around 85% of its total. Saying 100% means simpler maths to illustrate the point above
Now this is not to say that mega menus are a bad idea, it is just a trade-off in favour of Ux over internal link optimisation. In these situations you need to think what is best for your own specific situation.
Hope that helps
Oli
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
-
Over-optimizing Internal Linking: Is this real and, if so, what's the happy medium?
I have heard a lot about having a solid internal linking structure so that Google can easily discover pages and understand your page hierarchies and correlations and equity can be passed. Often, it's mentioned that it's good to have optimized anchor text, but not too optimized. You hear a lot of warnings about how over-optimization can be perceived as spammy: https://neilpatel.com/blog/avoid-over-optimizing/ But you also see posts and news like this saying that the internal link over-optimization warnings are unfounded or outdated:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SearchStan
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-no-internal-linking-overoptimization-penalty-27092.html So what's the tea? Is internal linking overoptimization a myth? If it's true, what's the tipping point? Does it have to be super invasive and keyword stuffy to negatively impact rankings? Or does simple light optimization of internal links on every page trigger this?1 -
Breadcrumbs or contextual links ?
Hi, I have breadcrumbs on my site but wondering if in addition to those I should also add contextual links linking to the same pages ? Or is it necessary to duplicate ? The reason i would be doing this is because contextual links/ editorial is what google likes and I am not sure breadcrumbs counts as much. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Can you recover from "Unnatural links to your site—impacts links" if you remove them or have they already been discounted?
If Google has already discounted the value of the links and my rankings dropped because in the past these links passed value and now they don't. Is there any reason to remove them? If I do remove them, is there a chance of "recovery" or should I just move forward with my 8 month old blogging/content marketing campaign.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Beastrip0 -
Webmaster Tools Internal Links
Hi all, I have around 400 links in the navigation menu (site-wide) and when I use webmaster tools to check for internal links to each page; some have as many as 250K and some as little as 200. Shouldn't the number of internal links for pages found in the navigation menu be relatively the same? Or is Google registering more internal links for pages linked closer to the top of the code Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carlos-R0 -
How to promote some links on google
Hi our site is http://www.mycarhelpline.com If people search on our site in Google by typing - Mycarhelpline they see links - why mycarhelpline, contact us and about us how can we put some other key pages by replacing above pages
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Best linking practice for international domains
SEOMoz team, I am wondering that in the days of Panda and Penguin SEOs have an opinion on how to best link between international domains for a web page property. Let's say you have brandname.DE (German site) brandname.FR (French site) brandname.CO.UK (British site) Right now we are linking form each site on the page to the other two language sites to make users aware of the translated version of the site which obviously make it a site wide link which seems to be lately disencouraged by Google. Did anyone out there have any ideas how to strategically interlink between international domains that represent language versions of a web site? /PP
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomypro0 -
Links directory: is it worth it?
Would there be any benefit or penalty for implementing a links directory with over 300 external links to websites that somtimes return the link? Or would it be more beneficial to simply ask for one way inbound links when gaining links? For example this section of this website: http://directory.flyawaysimulation.com/ This is their directory and most but not all of the sites in that directory link back to them. Your ideas, thoughts or suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640 -
Site Wide Internal Navigation links
Hello all, All our category pages www.pitchcare.com/shop are linked to from every product page via the sidebar navigation. Which results in every category page having over 1700 links with the same anchor text. I have noticed that the category pages dont appear to be ranked when they most definately should be. For example http://www.pitchcare.com/shop/moss-control/index.html is not ranked for the term "moss control" instead another of our deeper pages is ranked on page 1. Reading a previous SEO MOZ article · Excessive Internal Anchor Text Linking / Manipulation Can Trip An Automated Penalty on Google
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | toddyC
I recently had my second run-in with a penalty at Google that appears to punish sites for excessive internal linking with "optimized" (or "keyword stuffed anchor text") links. When the links were removed (in both cases, they were found in the footer of the website sitewide), the rankings were restored immediately following Google's next crawl, indicating a fully automated filter (rather than a manual penalty requiring a re-consideration request). Do you think we may have triggered a penalty? If so what would be the best way to tackle this? Could we add no follows on the product pages? Cheers Todd0