Whats the best practice for internal links?
-
Hi our site is set up typically for a key product (money page) with 6 to 12 cluster pages, with a few more associated blog pages.
If for example the key product was "funeral plans" what percentage of the internal anchor text links should be an exact match?
Will the prominence of those links eg higher up the page have an impact on the amount of juice flowing?
And do links in buttons count in the same way as on page anchor text eg "compare funeral plans"?
Many thanks
Ash -
@AshShep1 Exact Match Anchor Text: Use different types of words for links, not just the exact product name. It's better for search engines.
Where Links Are: Links at the top of the page might get noticed more, but it's more important that they make sense with the rest of the page.
Links in Buttons: Links in buttons work like regular links, so use words that make sense for the link and the button.
-
When you write, say, a long blog post, you might mention many different products that you sell, then you might want to add an internal link to the page, that sells that product.
It helps the customer find products that they might want to buy.
so we need to add internal links to all of these pages.
-
You are welcome
-
That's really helpful
Many thanks for taking the time
Ash
-
The rel=canonical element helps us determine which version of a URL is the original when multiple version of a URL returns the same content. This can happen when, for example, you append a tracking notation to a URL. Two discrete URLs then exist, yet both have identical content. By implementing a rel=canonical, you can tell us the original one, giving us a hint as to where we should place our trust. Do not use this element in place of a proper redirect when moving content.
Take for example the following URLs
- http://over50choices.co.uk/funeral-planning/wills-and-probate
- http://www.over50choices.co.uk/funeral-planning/wills-and-probate
- https://www.over50choices.co.uk/funeral-planning/wills-and-probate
- https://www.over50choices.co.uk/funeral-planning/wills-and-probate?ref=twitter
- https://www.over50choices.co.uk/funeral-planning/wills-and-probate/amp
Each URL is referring to the same page content for Legal Services, however, the URLs themselves are slightly different.
This can be an issue for search engines because the engine itself doesn’t necessarily know which page should be the source of truth, and it may just choose a canonical URL algorithmically for you.
In other words, if you have a web page accessible by multiple URLs, or different pages with similar content (ie. separate mobile and desktop versions), you should specify to a search engine which URL is authoritative (canonical) for that page.
In the Google Search Console, you can find the option to set URL parameters, once your website is verified. What this does is give you the ability to tell Google which parameters you would like to consider passive. What this means is that you can tell Google, “whenever you see this URL parameter, just treat it like it doesn’t exist”.
These are 2 good sources of what I'm talking about Google and Moz
-
Hi Roman
Thank you for your help.
Im looking at the speed issue as well.
None of our pages have the canonical tag on them - why is this so important?
Ash
-
Site: https://www.over50choices.co.uk/ “funeral plans”
Checking on Google there are 1,430 results for that keyword on your site
So that is starting point easy and fastInternal Links
- Input URL: https://www.over50choices.co.uk/funeral-planning/funeral-plans
- Total links: 124
- External links: 19 - (15%) of Total links
- Duplicate links: 45 - (36%) of Total links
- Empty anchor: 0
- No alt tag: 1
- Nofollow count (Line-through): 1
According to the On-Page Grader Tool
https://analytics.moz.com/pro/research/page-graderThese are some basic points to improve
- Avoid Keyword Stuffing
- Keyword Placement in Page Title
- Optimal Use of Keywords in Header Tags
- Includes a Rel Canonical Tag ----> This is very Important
-
I made a quick audit of your website and will make some assumptions
This is your flagship page
https://www.over50choices.co.uk/funeral-planning/funeral-plansAs I see you already have a good backlink profile but suddenly you have been losing ranks these are some advice to you
- check the spam score of all your backlinks (Here on Moz is called Spam Score on Semrush is Called Toxic Score)
- build internal links (I will assume that you are working on that right now)
- disavow all the useless links
- build new backlinks
Also, I notice a Drop on ranks on October (Ahref rank) keeping in mind that you are in a competitive niche all the details are important
- You need to figure out how to improve your user experience, making a quick test on PageSpeed there are several small tasks that you can perform to improve it (Enable the compression, Leverage, Browser Cache) By itself will not show a big impact but the summary of all of them can show a big impact. AMP can give you more visibility on mobile devices
-
Thank you for your detailed answer, its much appreciated.
Our site is www.over50choices.co.uk is well established with a national presence.
We have 5 or 6 "cornerstone" products and until recently have been successful with most of them through natural search, we do v little PPC.
We have seen "funeral plans" and "over 50 life insurance" rankings drop from top half of page 1 to bottom/page 2 positions which of course impacts our earnings.
Our site has always been set up in the way that you suggest, so the reason for my questions are because we have been looking at ways to squeeze every last bit of juice we can and more recently have read about the importance of internal links, so was keen to understand whether the sidebar site wide links was not the most effective way to structure the site going forwards?
They have always been there but if google has changed the rules recently i was wondering whether this is what could be hurting us.
We have started a review of internal links for these products as we have so many and the early findings are that we could do with some tidying up but nothing major.
All of our other long tail keywords are still performing well, so its just the big keywords that generate a lot of our income that have dropped.
Does this info help shed any more light on why they may have dropped?
Thanks
Ash
-
Just to clarify then, having to say 300 links all with the same anchor text and most with an exact match to the main keyword/product is ok?
I will assume that you want to rank your site for the keyword funeral plans
I'll explain exactly what I would doBut first, you need to be clear in some basic concepts
The structure of a website and your internal link is of great importance for its
chances to rank in search engines. For two main reasons:1 A decent structure and internal linking make sure Google ‘understands’ your site.
2 A decent structure makes sure you do not compete with your own content.Important terms and definitions that you have to keep in mind to understand what I'm doing
Keyword research (I will assume that you already did it and you know what is)
Long tail keywords in your case these are some examplesprepaid funeral plans - Volume 100 - Keyword Difficulty: 08
cost of prepaid funeral plans - Volume 50 - Keyword Difficulty: 07
low-cost funeral plans - Volume 40 - Keyword Difficulty: 04Landing pages are the main pages through which visitors enter your
website.In this case, I will assume you are a local business
so one of your landing pages will look like thisAll depends on your site structure and your content
Cornerstone contents are the most important articles or pages on your website.
This is the content that exactly reflects your business. These articles
should be relatively high in your site structure. In most cases, the
homepage directly links to these pages or articlesIn affiliate marketing, this content is called Money Pages
Definition: A piece of content that is monetized in some fashion, such as
promoting products as an affiliate, capturing leads to sell them to a
3rd party or heavy advertisement.Here on Moz is called 10X content
https://moz.com/blog/how-to-create-10x-content-whiteboard-fridayWhat is cornerstone content?
https://yoast.com/what-is-cornerstone-content/So instead on focus on anchor text or internal links or link counts
the first question and the most important that you need to answer is- What is your main content?
- What is your business about?
So if you provide funeral plans on a specific location
all your business needs to be focused on that ( SEO, PPC, Social Media) all your internal links will be focused on those pages. You don't just start to build internal link just because you read an article about it. **I need to have a goal in mind **Example
Title: Affordable Funeral Plans Miami - Title
URL: wwww.yourwebsite.com/funeral-plans/So this what I would do on your case
- **Define your cornerstone content (Your internal links will point to these) **
- **Make a keyword research looking for all closed related term of your main keyword **
- Building internal links to those pages using the keywords above (main+secondary)
- Make almost perfect On-page optimization
- Add Schemas to that page to add even more visibility
- **Add Amp version of that page **
- **Finally, build some back-links to those pages **
Hope this info helps you to answer your question
-
Yes its in the sidebar.
Just to clarify then, having say 300 links all with the same anchor text and most with an exact match to the main keyword/product is ok ?
Also if say i have an internal link in the main body of content for one of the pages linked that is also in the sidebar which will google take as the primary link eg sidebar link is "over 50 life insurance" and link in page content is "compare life insurance" both going to the same page?
Ash
-
I'm assuming that you are talking about a widget when you say "Quick Links Boxes" in the sidebar or in the footer or any other specific area. There's no need to remove them but you need to keep in mind that all those links will make those pages outstand over other pages.
So your main question is this. Do you want to make those pages your **10X content (Most relevant pages) **If the answer is positive keep the Link Box if not just remove it.
-
HI Roman
Thank you for your answer.
We also have site wide "Quick Links" boxes on most pages where we have a list of anchor text with links eg
- Equity Release Calculator
- Compare funeral plans
- Affordable Health Insurance
- Over 50 Life Insurance
These are in addition to on page text links.
So google will see hundreds of links coming in to these key pages all with the same anchor text - should we continue with this or remove them?
Regards
Ash
-
If for example, the key product was "funeral plans" what percentage of the internal anchor text links should be an exact match? there is no static rule about it, so your starting point will be your own Search Console Account and your GA Account
Unlike external links, where over-optimization of anchor text is manipulative and can lead to penalties, internal links should have optimized anchor text. Using keyword-rich anchor text is helpful to both search crawlers and users clicking the link.
My advice is to select all your target keyword and all the close variation and start to create internal links on this way
**Check your most relevant pages **
1. Pages that had high traffic and PA. You can find these in Google Analytics, Search Console and Ahrefs
2. Pages where the keyword already existed unlinked. You can use this query to find such pages: Site:[yoursite.com] “funeral plans”In your case, searching for “funeral plans” will show you a number of mentions
After making a list of these pages add internal links by hand. (This is my personal option other people use tools, plugins or whatever) These new links from established posts showed Google that you thought of this page as “important.”Will the prominence of those links eg higher up the page has an impact on the amount of juice flowing?
First and foremost, internal links are important because they help search engines better understand your site.
A large number of internal links pointing to a specific page signal that page is important and helps search engines determine which pages to return in their search results.
Sometimes a broader category page will rank above a specific product page for a query about that specific product — this is less than ideal.
For example, a company that sells different types of bats could see their general “Bats” category page ranking above their “Softball bats” page for the query [cheap softball bats]. Internally linking to the “Softball bats” page could help Google recognize it should be returning that page for the given query.
And do links in buttons count in the same way as on page anchor text eg "compare funeral plans"? It will help you to pass link juice to your page but it will not help Google to understand the content of that page (It will not help you to rank for your target keyword)
** I hope this info helps you to answer your question**
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
-
Faceted Navigation URLs Best Practices
Hi, We are developing new Products Pages with faceted filters. You can see it here: https://www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/ We have a feature allowing to Order By and Group By, which alters the order of all products. There will also be the option to view Products as a table, which will contain same products but with different design and maybe slightly different content of each product. All this will happen without changing the URL, https://www.viatrading.com/all/ Is this the best practice? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading10 -
Should we optimise our internal links?
Hi again, We recently had a technical search audit done by a specialist agency and they discovered a number of internal links that caused redirects to happen. The agency has recommended we update all of these links to link directly to the destination so we don't lose out on link equity. We'd just like to know if you think this would be a worthwhile use of our time. Our web team seem to think that returning a 301 to a crawler means that the crawler will stop indexing the original URL and instead index the redirected destination? Thanks all. Clair
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iescape2 -
SEO best practices for embedding content in a map
My company is working on creating destination guides for families exploring where to go on their next vacation. We've been creating and promoting content on our blog for quite some time in preparation for the map-based discovery. The UX people in my company are pushing for design/functionality similar to:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vacatia_SEO
http://sf.eater.com/maps/the-38-essential-san-francisco-restaurants-january-2015 From a user perspective, we all love this, but I'm the SEO guy and I'm having a hard time figuring out the best way to guide my team regarding getting readers to the actual blog article from the left content area. The way they want to do it is to have the content displayed overtop the map when someone clicks on a pin. Great, but there's no way for me to optimize the map for every article. After all, if we have an article about best places to snorkel on Maui, I want Google to direct people to the blog article specific to that search term because that page is the authority on that subject. Additionally, the map page itself will have no original content because it will be pulling all the blog content from other URLS, which will get no visitors if people read on the map. We also want people, when they find an article they like, to be able to copy a URL to share. If the article is housed on the map page, the URL will be ugly and long (not SEO friendly) based on parameters from the filters the visitor used to drill down to that article. So I don't think I can simply optimize the map filtered-URL. Can I? The others on my team do not want visitors to ping pong back and forth between map and article and would prefer people stay on the discovery map. We did have a thought that we'd give people an option to click a link to read the article off the map but I doubt people will do it which means that page will never been visited, thus crushing it's page rank. so questions: How can i pass link juice/SEO love from the map page to the actual blog article while keeping the user on the map? Does google pass that juice if you use Iframes? What about doing ajax calls? Anyone have experience doing this? Am I making a mountain out of a molehill? Should I trust that if I create good content, good UX and allow people to explore how they prefer, Google will give me the love? Help me Rand Fishkin, you're my only hope!1 -
OSE link report showing links to 404 pages on my site
I did a link analysis on this site mormonwiki.com. And many of the pages shown to be linked to were pages like these http://www.mormonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Planning_a_trip_to_Rome_By_using_Movie_theatre_-_Your_five_Fun_Shows2052752 There happens to be thousands of them and these pages actually no longer exist but the links to them obviously still do. I am planning to proceed by disavowing these links to the pages that don't exist. Does anyone see any reason to not do this, or that doing this would be unnecessary? Another issue is that Google is not really crawling this site, in WMT they are reporting to have not crawled a single URL on the site. Does anyone think the above issue would have something to do with this? And/or would you have any insight on how to remedy it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThridHour0 -
Does the number of links on a page metric include repeated links?
Just wondering if the number of links on the page metric includes links that are repeated? So, if I had 100 links to one page would this count as 100 or 1 link?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cornwall
If it's the former does this mean more links to one page adds weight? Thanks0 -
Canonical Meta Tag Best Practices
I've noticed that some website owners use canonical tags even when there may be no duplicate issues.For examplewww.examplesite.com has a canonical tag.......rel="canonical" href="http://www.examplesite.com/" />www.examplesite.com/bluewidget has a canonical tag.......rel="canonical" href="http://www.examplesite.com/bluewidget/" />Is this recommended or helpful to do this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate0 -
What is the best way to hide duplicate, image embedded links from search engines?
**Hello! Hoping to get the community’s advice on a technical SEO challenge we are currently facing. [My apologies in advance for the long-ish post. I tried my best to condense the issue, but it is complicated and I wanted to make sure I also provided enough detail.] Context: I manage a human anatomy educational website that helps students learn about the various parts of the human body. We have been around for a while now, and recently launched a completely new version of our site using 3D CAD images. While we tried our best to design our new site with SEO best practices in mind, our daily visitors dropped by ~15%, despite drastic improvements we saw in our user interaction metrics, soon after we flipped the switch. SEOMoz’s Website Crawler helped us uncover that we now may have too many links on our pages and that this could be at least part of the reason behind the lower traffic. i.e. we are not making optimal use of links and are potentially ‘leaking’ link juice now. Since students learn about human anatomy in different ways, most of our anatomy pages contain two sets of links: Clickable links embedded via JavaScript in our images. This allows users to explore parts of the body by clicking on whatever objects interests them. For example, if you are viewing a page on muscles of the arm and hand and you want to zoom in on the biceps, you can click on the biceps and go to our detailed biceps page. Anatomy Terms lists (to the left of the image) that list all the different parts of the body on the image. This is for users who might not know where on the arms the biceps actually are. But this user could then simply click on the term “Biceps” and get to our biceps page that way. Since many sections of the body have hundreds of smaller parts, this means many of our pages have 150 links or more each. And to make matters worse, in most cases, the links in the images and in the terms lists go to the exact same page. My Question: Is there any way we could hide one set of links (preferably the anchor text-less image based links) from search engines, such that only one set of links would be visible? I have read conflicting accounts of different methods from using JavaScript to embedding links into HTML5 tags. And we definitely do not want to do anything that could be considered black hat. Thanks in advance for your thoughts! Eric**
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_R0 -
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