Breadcrumbs and internal links
-
Hello,
I use to move up my site structure with links in content. I have now installed breadcrumbs, is it is useful to still keep the links in content or isn't there a need to duplicate those links ? and are the breadcrumbs links enough.
Thank you,
-
Thanks for your comment Paul
-
Glad to help
-
Thank both for your answers. There are very helpful and all is clear. I know now that it is best to have both.
-
I think Roman's response is thorough and well reasoned. I'm a content strategist (not a designer or developer), so I like the way his answer puts the user front and center. Bottom line: do in-text links and bread crumb links both help users? Yes, depending where you are on the page and how deep the page is. My instinct on bread crumbs is that their especially helpful once you get a couple pages deep in a site and a user might start to get a bit disoriented. My in-text links are often more driven by the content itself, what will provide added value to the user (or potentially SEO value to another page on the site). Hope that's helpful.
-
As I see you have question about duplicated links and the answer depends on your needs let me explain my point.
Why Redundant Links on the Same Page Are a Good Idea. There are many reasons why you might want to show duplicate links on the same page. Here are some common motivations
- Provide safety nets: If people don’t notice the link the first time, maybe they will notice the second occurrence as they scroll the page. The redundancy may minimize individual differences: one person might notice the link at the top, while another person might notice it at the bottom. Showing links in multiple places is thus hypothesized to capture a broader audience.
- Deal with long pages: Having to scroll all the way up to the top of an overly long page is time-consuming. Offering users alternative ways to access links will help alleviate the pain.
- Create visual balance: Empty space is common on top-level (wayfinding) pages, where content might be sparse or nonexistent. Filling in awkward white space with extra copies of links will make the page look more balanced
- **Follow the evidence: **Analytics show that traffic to desired destination pages increase when links to them are duplicated.
Why Redundant Links Are a Bad Idea (Most of the Time)
Redundancy can be good or bad depending on when it’s applied. Each of the explanations above may sound reasonable. However, relying on redundancy too frequently or without careful consideration can turn your site into a navigation quagmire.What’s the big deal about having a few duplicate links on the page?
- Each additional link increases the interaction cost required to process the link because it rises the number of choices people must process. The fewer the choices, the faster the processing time.
- Each additional link depletes users’ attention because it competes with all others. Users only have so much attention to give and often don’t see stuff that’s right on the screen. So when you grab more attention for one link, you lose it for the others: there’s substantial opportunity cost to extra linking.
- Each additional link places an extra load on users’ working memory because it causes people to have to remember whether they have seen the link before or it is a new link. Are the two links the same or different? Users often wonder if there is a difference that they missed. In usability studies, we often observe participants pause and ponder which they should click. The more courageous users click on both links only to be disappointed when they discover that the links lead to the same page. Repetitive links often set user up to fail.
- Extra links waste users’ time whenever users don’t realize that two links lead to the same place: if they click both links, then the second click is wasteful at best. At worst, users also don’t recognize that they’ve already visited the destination page, causing them to waste even more time on a second visit to that page. (Remember that to you, the distinctions between the different pages on your site are obvious. Not so for users: we often see people visit the same page a second time without realizing that they’ve already been there.)
**CONCLUSION **
Sometimes navigation is improved when you have more room to explain it. If this is the case, duplicating important navigational choices in the content area can give you more flexibility to supplement the links with more detailed descriptions to help users better understand the choices.
Providing redundancy on webpages can sometimes help people find their way. However, redundancy increases the interaction cost. Duplicating links is one of the four major dangerous navigation techniquesthat cause cognitive strain. Even if you increase traffic to a specific page by adding redundant links to it, you may lose return traffic to the site from users who are confused and can’t find what they want.
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
-
How Do You Do Link Building??
I am starting to use the Moz pro tools like optimizing on page SEO for keywords and looking for opportunities. I know link building is a huge part for getting rankings on keywords in google search. Where do I start and how do I do the link building process for specific keywords I can rank for?? Thank you in advance for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wickerparadise1 -
Link building - still effective ?
Hi, I know 70-80% of the links on Google have no-follow keyword. What I need to know is if link building by using guest posting and a combination of no-follow links through social media is still effective ? What would you suggest in terms of link building. I have read all the articles on moz and everything, but I need a personal touch on this matter. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kiraftw
Andrei0 -
Link Audit - Sponsor/Partners Images Links
Hi everyone, 1. I'm conducting a link audit and read that if you are a sponsor or partner of a company, links should be nofollowed. I always no follow them if they are money keywords, but branded I leave alone. is that a good strategy? Or do i nofollow my brand name as well? 2. What if I'm a sponsor and have my company logo on their website that links to my website? How would i know if that link should be nofollowed? a. Does it depend on the "alt" of the image? b. Does it depend on the landing page of the link of the image? c. Do i just no follow image links from sponsor pages and partner pages as a whole? Please keep in mind that I'm sponsoring websites that are relevant to my niche. PLEASE HELP!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Spam Links? -115 Domains Sharing the Same IP Address, to Remove or Not Remove Links
Out of 250 domains that link to my site about 115 are from low quality directories that are published by the same company and hosted on the same ip address. Examples of these directories are: -www.keydirectory.net -www.linkwind.com -www.sitepassage.com -www.ubdaily.com -www.linkyard.org A recent site audit from a reputable SEO firm identified 125 toxic links. I assume these are those toxic links. They also identified about another 80 suspicious domains linking to my site. They audit concluded that my site is suffering a partial Penguin penalty due to low quality links. My question is whether it is safe to remove these 125 links from the low quality directories. I am concerned that removing this quantity of links all at once will cause a drop in ranking because the link profile will be thin with only about 125 domains remaining that point to the site. Granted those 125 domains should be of somewhat better quality. I am playing with fire by having these removed. I URGENTLY NEED ADVICE AS THE WEBMASTER HAS INITIATED STEPS TO REMOVE THE 125 LINKS. Thanks everyone!!! Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Cooking Recipes Blog Links
Hi, I am running an ecommerce store - cookware, bakeware, knives etc... I have someone I know personally that is a writer and one of her blogs is about cooking - lots of well established articles with keywords througout. Is there any harm in getting some inbound links from her blog on certain keywords? If so, should I limit the number of outgoing links per article she has? Any guidelines? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Real impact of canonical links?
I am responsible for 2 e-commerce websites. SEO Moz and Google Web Master tools both inform me regularly that on both sites there are many instances of duplicate titles, headings, decriptions and page content. Obviously from an SEO point of view I am more than a little concerned about this! Out product pages struggle to perform strongly despite the fact that our website is of a decent quality and we are leaders in our field. Our competitors rank above us when they add a product page, whereas we normal flit in between 8-10 or on the 2nd SERP. I know it is hard without viewing the site, but is duplicate content likely to be a strong, leading factor in this? I think it is, but want to put together a business case to spend the cash to sort it out....just need someone confirmation that this is worth sorting as a priority. Here are 2 examples of what I mean: 1) Category pages www.exampledomain.co.uk/category1.aspx We have filters on our category page (so the customer can sort products based on their price, colour, size etc.). When filters are used a new URL is generared. www.exampledomain.co.uk/category1.aspx?prices=0||10 www.exampledomain.co.uk/category1.aspx?prices=10||20 The content, titles, description is the same although the links are different. Do I need to set up a canonical tag on the page that reads: 2) Product pages Product pages on the websites have different URLs depending on how to arrive on them. You get 1 URL if you navigated to the page via the website navigation, but you get another different URL if you used the website search functionality to find the page. Example: Search link: www.exampledomain.co.uk/category1/Product1.aspx Navigation link: www.exampledomain.co.uk/12345/category1/Product1.aspx Again, do I need to set up a canonical tag for 1 of these link types so that the link benefit is not shared over 2 pages? Any feedback would be welcome! At the moment the ability to add canonical tags is locked down by our CMS (I know, rubbish!)...so website development would be needed - hence the need for a business case!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
Link equity of ifram
If I link an iframe to pull its content - does that count as inbound link for the iframed content? Am I passing linklove to that page? I am on x.com and have an iframe pull content from z.com. Does this give linklove from x to z.com? (I am NOT asking if the z context is indexed in x, although I am weary to follow the most frequent statement that they do not. Google states that they will try to pull the content from the iframe, but don't guarantee it.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andreas.wpv0 -
Can I reduce number of on page links by just adding "no follow" tags to duplicate links
Our site works on templates and we essentially have a link pointing to the same place 3 times on most pages. The links are images not text. We are over 100 links on our on page attributes, and ranking fairly well for key SERPS our core pages are optimized for. I am thinking I should engage in some on-page link juice sculpting and add some "no follow" tags to 2 of the 3 repeated links. Although that being said the Moz's on page optimizer is not saying I have link cannibalization. Any thoughts guys? Hope this scenario makes sense.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robertrRSwalters0