Too Many Internal Links?

[ScottBaxterWW]

Hi Guys,

I'm completing a overhawl of our website at the moment have a certain penguin killed our site for our main keyword.

I'm currently working on our internal linking as most of our blog posts have a link back to our home page with the main money keyword.

At present we have 3,331 internal links and our site has only 1,000 pages.

Can you get penalised for having too many internal links with exact match anchors.

Thanks,

Scott

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Scott,

Let me be very specific about what we're talking about. To be clear, no you can't get penalized for too much internal exact match anchor text, but you can hurt your rankings.

It's very common to have site-wide internal anchor text on your website, all with the same anchor text, all pointing to the same page - especially if it's in the navigation. For example, SEOmoz has literally 100,000 links pointing to it's tools page with the anchor text "research tools"

That said, it's best to vary your anchor text the best you can, and be careful where you place it. Sitewide anchor text in your footer is probably the least valuable spot (and potentially the most harmful) followed by the sidebar and header. The best anchor text is often editorial links within the main text body, using natural, non-repeating phrases.

Hmmm... now that I read your question again, it probably does look unnatural if every blog post has the same anchor text in it, pointing to your homepage. Best to clean that up.

And check out this latest Whiteboard Friday on internal linking.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

[tomcraig86]

Internally linking to the homepage is best practice, if anything.

Penguin related problems arise where there are keyword stuffing issues, or anything else that could be seen as webspam.

As well as looking at your internal link profile, it might also be a good idea to check out your use of keywords on the /main money' keyword!