What is the effect of too many internal links on a page?
-
Hi there! We have been doing a great effort during the last year but our main competitor is still above us in search rankings. Basically, the main differente remains now in the number of internal links, specially in our homepage. We have more than 200 and they only have around 100, so I think we are wasting too much link power among some irrelevant pages. What could be the effect of this?
-
I think that I would use the homepage to promote my most profitable, most brandable and most linkable content. After adopting that philosophy I would increase/decrease the number of links on my homepage to see what produces the most visitor engagement and conversions.
But, getting to your original question... if you are getting your butt kicked in the SERPs you need to go out after links and likes and produce more of the content that attracts them. SEO is a battle of resources and those resources are linkable content and links/likes, etc.
-
Then you're effectively dividing your link juice much more than they are. This is mostly still relevant - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-juice-is-loose
Edit - Wait I take that back, using nofollow to sculpt page rank isn't a recommendation I would give. It still works a bit but I simply want you to watch that video and understand how link juice flows around a site.
Some things you may want to try are to reduce the number of links and only have converting or money making pages linked to from the home page and building links from other sites directly into the subpages.
Building links directly into subpages should have the greatest effect.
Edit - But please don't just chop off links without thinking about it, take some time to work out how you want Googlebot and visitors to move around your site and make sure that you still have links into ALL the pages on your site (but not necessarily from the homepage).
Also, check if all the subpages are being cached regularly, if not then it's probably a fair assumption Google's not working it's way through all your links.
-
If I did understand well, that's exactly what is happening. We're outranking them for the most important keyword for our homepage (which is the same keyword for them) but they're beating us up in all deeper pages - even if we have a very similar structure...
And our domain and homepage has a better link profile than theirs according to Open Site Explorer.
-
I think that 100 links is just a guideline rather than a hard rule. I believe that your most relevant links, your sitemap index and other indispensible links should be only placed on the homepage. The idea of the homepage is to have links leading to the most important links to your next level of links (category links). If you have a page with more than 100 links means that you have a bad hiearchy in terms of Google. I wouldnt advocate it.
-
If I can just add a thought for you as well, assuming your homepage is the one ranking for the keyword that your competitor is beating you on, the PR isn't being distributed until AFTER the link juice is being accounted for, i.e. The homepage still has 50 linkjuice points (I just made that up) which are split between 200 links vs your competitors 50 LJP (but I'm going to keep using it) being split among 100 links; basically the ranking factor of the links should only occur further down your site structure.
What may be a factor with those links is whether you're linking off the page with your main keyword to a subpage. So if you want your homepage to rank for 'keyword' having an exact match anchor link with the text 'keyword' may have some effect.
-
Hi Candida,
The link juice of the homepage is splitted between the 200 links of the page, SEOMoz recommends about 100 links per page. This may not be the cause of the ranking difference, but you should consider removing the links to the less important pages.
If you wish to make a more important change to your linking architecture, you should follow a pyramidal architecture as described in several seomoz articles :
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/internal-link
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/diagrams-for-solving-crawl-priority-indexation-issues
-
Hi Candida,
Long time ago Google was recommending 100 Links per page and it was one of their Guidelines, But they don't anymore. (Matt Cutts Reference it in this Video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6g5hoBYlf0)
Try to audit your 200 links and see if all the links are important and adds value to your visitor. but IMO i don't think there is an effect of you having 100 or 200 links more in consideration of your SERPs.
Try to use Linkscape and see your competitor links, and try to pull and acquire the most relevant links linking to your competitor.
Cheers
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
-
Which page will rank higher, my main article or the sub article linking from it?
Hi all, Can you help me figure this one out? I'm currently creating content for my website and I very badly want to know which page will rank higher in Google, my main article that has some keywords that are and links to my sub-article, or my sub-article which is optimized for those keywords? I will demonstrate with an example since I'm not sure my question is clear: If I have an article that talks about different kinds of candy and it links to a sub-article that will elaborate on specific candies like a mint candy ,which page will rank for mint candies. Until today I believed that if my sub-article which is linked from my main-article will rank for mint candies since it gets the support from my main article.Lately when experimenting this I found my thoughts to be wrong. Can anyone help me with this one?Any insights? Thanks, Leebi
On-Page Optimization | | Leebi0 -
How does the footer links impact the the pages SEO quality?
Hi, i want to ask a question. Does this kind of internal links will affect the SEO post quality? Please open the attachment (image) KskOg3U
On-Page Optimization | | joshuaong0 -
We´re in trouble with our on site internal link optimization - please help
Dear Moz community, We have made a great mistake. Looking at keyword search volumes somehow Moz showed volumes for two keywords which only differentiate by an '**s (plural) as same. **Now we optimized our internal links (all links have the keyword) for the singular word. Now looking at other search volume estimations from competitors we see, that the plural has 5 times bigger volume. Our issue: If we change some of the category links now to another keyword, we will loose our ranking with the singular word. Correct? If we do not change any of our internal links, we will never rank in top 6 with the keyword. (currently singular is 6 and plural is 15) What would you reccomend?
On-Page Optimization | | advertisingcloud0 -
Too Many on page links! Will "NoFollow" for navigation help?
I am getting to many on page links ( for all my pages). Here is my website: http://www.websterpowerproducts.co.uk I think it is to do with the the navigation bar down the right hand side. I don't really want to get ride of this as it offers users a way of getting where they want without lots of clicking. I was wondering if adding a "NoFollow" tag to each of they links would stop the link juice getting diluted by the navigation bar. Many Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | WebsterPowerTools0 -
"City page" links in footer of home page: Spammy?
Is listing a bunch of links to city pages in the footer of a home page considered "spammy" to Google? (ie- Chicago Alarms, Illinois Alarms, Naperville Alarms, etc.) What are the negative affects this might have on ranking, if any?
On-Page Optimization | | MChi0 -
Is there a SEO penalty for multi links on same page going to same destination page?
Hi, Just a quick note. I hope you are able to assist. To cut a long story short, on the page below http://www.bookbluemountains.com.au/ -> Features Specials & Packages (middle column) we have 3 links per special going to the same page.
On-Page Optimization | | daveupton
1. Header is linked
2. Click on image link - currently with a no follow
3. 'More info' under the description paragraph is linked too - currently with a no follow Two arguments are as follows:
1. The reason we do not follow all 3 links is to reduce too many links which may appear spammy to Google. 2. Counter argument:
The point above has some validity, However, using no follow is basically telling the search engines that the webmaster “does not trust or doesn’t take responsibility” for what is behind the link, something you don’t want to do within your own website. There is no penalty as such for having too many links, the search engines will generally not worry after a certain number.. nothing that would concern this business though. I would suggest changing the no follow links a.s.a.p. Could you please advise thoughts. Many thanks Dave Upton [long signature removed by staff]0 -
Authority of a page
What factors contribute towards the authority of a page ? No. of links to a page ?
On-Page Optimization | | seoug_20050 -
On page internal link text
Hi, I'm in the process of rebuilding/designing an existing well ranking niche bespoke software site and have the following question - In the footer, I'm planning on linking to the main landing pages (blue widget software, red widget software etc theres about 7 in total). In these links I want to know if its best to have the word "software" in each link as I'm scared of it looking spamy. We sell custom software, and a lot of the keywords that currently attract traffic (as reported in analytics) end in the word software, for example - blue widget software red widget software In the footer would you end each link with software or not? How much effect would this have on rankings? Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | JamesJacobs0