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Too much internal linking?
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Hi everyone,
Too much of anything is not good. In terms of internal linking, how many are too many? I read that the recommended internal links are about 100 links per page otherwise it dilutes the page's link equity. I have a concern about one of our websites - according to search console, the homepage has 923 internal links. All the pages have a corresponding /feed page added to the page URL, which is really weird (is this caused by a plugin?). The site also has an e-com feature, but it is not used as the site is essentially a brochure and customers are encouraged to visit the shop. I assume the e-com feature also increases this number.
On the other hand, one of the competitors we are tracking has 1 internal link site-wide. Ours is at 45,000 site-wide. How is it possible to only have 1 internal link? Is this a Moz bug?
I know we also need to reduce our internal links badly, however, I'm not sure where to start. I don't know how these internal links are linked together - some aren't in the copy or navigation menu. When I scan the homepage links using 'check my links', the total links identified for the homepage is only 170.
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Thanks so much for taking the time to respond. Our website still has a small amount of SEO authority and I think too much internal links is spreading our equity thin. Having a look at our pages, the blog and product categories are inflating our internal links. I'll see if I can remove these.
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This depends upon several factors, one of those being how large your brand is online and how powerful your site / domain is in terms of SEO authority / aggregate link equity. If you have a really big eCommerce site with lots of authority, building it out with clean / permalink faceted navigation (which results in more URLs and also more internal links) can be a really good thing.
If you have lots of authority, the re-distributing some of it to clean up the long-tail through site build-out and link creation is an excellent idea. But those new links and addresses should serve a purpose for end users (such as giving them more control in terms of searching all of your products). Equally if you are a giant informational resource like Wikipedia which is innately trusted by many (and linked to billions of times across the web) - you have enough equity to interlink almost all of your articles. Again it helps Wikipedia to sweep up long-tail traffic with some of their less known articles by giving those a boost.
If you have a small amount of SEO authority or you're just starting out, then these enterprise-level tactics will only detract (at least initially) from your SEO strategy. If you only have fragments of SEO authority and they're all constantly in transit, flying around through links to hundreds of pages... It ends up being like having 2-3 coins in the bottom tray ('main table') of one of those coin machines you find at a fairground (or maybe in a gambling / amusement arcade). They're often referred to as a 'medal game' or a 'coin pusher' (see this resource: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medal_game)
These are the games you play where, you drop something like a 2-pence coin into the top. The coin falls down a segmented back-plate and ends up 'somewhere' on the main table. If that area of the main table is already full of coins, your additional coin can trigger a cascade where you get more cash back out than you put in. Link structure is quite similar to this. If your 'main table' has lots of SEO authority and you use deep linking to slot a coin to the bottom, long-tail and mid-body rankings can come out. If your table has barely any coins on, then you just throw that link equity (symbolised by the coin) away with no true benefit 'coming out' the other end.
Think about the size of your site / brand and what it has already achieved online. Is now the time for deep-linking with such volume? If not, reign it in until later - at which point such tactics could really benefit you.
Because different sites are necessarily different sizes (through the features and functions they need to supply users with), and because different domains have totally different levels of SEO-equity / authority behind them (different amounts of coins on their main tables) - there are no hard-and-fast rules about how many internal (or external) links to deploy per page.
It depends entirely upon who you are, what you're worth (in traffic terms) and what your site has to do.
Here's a video of someone playing a 'coin pusher' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMhPnPfB_CI, I'm pretty sure you will see that, it's a decent analogy for those starting out in terms of looking at internal link structure
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