Heavy Internal Linking Help
-
One of the sites I work on is a home improvement ecommerce website that does fairly well for its niche. One of the biggest problems that we're not sure how to adequately handle is a heavy internal linking issue. The homepage (http://www.fauxpanels.com/) has approx. 226 internal links which is mainly due to the navigation structure. There are far worse pages though (the Samples page http://www.fauxpanels.com/samples.php has over 800 internal links).
For the most part, management doesn't want any massive changes to the navigation layout. The Top navigation bar has a number of dropdown menus when you hover, the Left Navigation Bar expands to show more choices, and the Bottom navigation bar in many instances is just repeats of links that can be found elsewhere. Also, the product links in the body of the page can be found linked in the Left Navigation. This is not what I would personally consider the best way to handle navigation but the Customer Service Department has gotten numerous calls and emails over the years about how much people love our navigation and how easy it is to find things.
My thought was trying to lessen the amount of links by having things grouped more often into Category pages/hub pages where applicable so we can remove some of the links. We've also considered NoFollowing links but my understanding is that even if you NoFollow the link equity is still divided by the number of on-page links.
So, any of you much more experienced SEOs have any idea how I can lessen the heavy internal linking without completely re-doing the site's navigation layout and not harming link equity, ranking, etc.? Or, conversely, would you consider having an average 200-300 internal links per page not to be a real issue given the positive effect it has apparently had on user experience?
-
Good to hear you are already working on the search bar. Expandable categories on the samples page could be a very good alternative as well. Just test a few different options to find the best solution!
-
Thanks Joram. Part of me was thinking the internal links were an issue of higher priority and the other half of me was thinking it's not that big of a deal if no one is having issues with it.
As for the Search Bar, one of our coders is currently in the process of tweaking our auto-complete to make search more robust... so that will be coming down the line in the relatively near future. We've found that most people using our search bar are searching for highly specific terms like model numbers which, unfortunately, if not perfectly entered wasn't returning the correct information (which is being worked on as well). I believe I've suggested to management in the past about making the search bar more prominent but with our current setup the only feasible way of doing this involved adding a second line to the Top Navigation which then caused some conflicts with the dropdown menus. (Its something I can look into again though).
The Samples page... yep, its a mess. I've actually suggested creating samples category pages to make things easier but that's been shot down. There was talk of using CSS to hide the various sections until someone clicked to expand but that was held off at some point. Might be worth giving up on lessening the internal linking and looking at that again to make Samples more manageable.
-
If I was you I'd rather focus on keeping your site as user friendly as possible than trying to find out how much hundreds of internal links are or aren't harming your site's SEO. You said the site is doing fairly well, so I assume you haven't had major problems with rankings etc.
I think it's very positive that you keep listening to your customers, instead of ignoring them to change something of which you don't even know the effect. In the end it's better to have 100 visitors with 10% conversion, than 150 with 5%.
What you could test though is placing a larger version of your search bar on a more prominent place on your homepage. Especially a properly working search bar with auto-complete could help finding pages that are now hidden somewhere in your top menu. At first you just place this search bar in addition to the existing navigation. When your web analytics after a while show that many of your visitors use the search bar to navigate through your site, you might want to reconsider removing some of the links in your existing navigation.
About the samples page: I would split it up into separate pages for each category. This will bring the number of internal links down dramatically and makes it easier to find the sample you're looking for. Now the page is extremely long and it's difficult to find the right category. By using separate pages you can also create nice (keyword containing?) url's like /samples/carlton-brick-panels/.
Best of luck!
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
-
Benefit of internal link in content
Hi, Is there a real benefit to having internal links in content other than at the bottom of a page for example and not surrounded by content. Would the benefit be 1 to 10 or 1 to 1.5 ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Internal Linking
Hi, I'm doing internal anchor text links. Relative path. if I use /destination-page instead of https://website.com/destination-page will I still receive a transfer of internal Google trust to the destination page? Does google treat just the / url the same as full url??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Scotty_Wilson0 -
350 (Out the 750) Internal Links Listed by Webmaster Tools Dynamically Generated-Best to Remove?
Greetings MOZ Community: When visitors enter real estate search parameters in our commercial real estate web site, the parameters are somehow getting indexed as internal links in Google Webmaster Tools. About half are 700 internal links are derived from these dynamic URLs. It seems to me that these dynamic alphanumeric URL links would dilute the value of the remaining static links. Are the dynamic URLs a major issue? Are they high priority to remove? The dynamic URLs look like this: /listings/search?fsrepw-search-neighborhood%5B%5D=m_0&fsrepw-search-sq-ft%5B%5D=1&fsrepw-search-price-range%5B%5D=4&fsrepw-search-type-of-space%5B%5D=0&fsrepw-search-lease-type=1 These URLs do not show up when a SITE: URL search is done on Google!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Problem with internal links
Hello! Our domain, http://www.unionroom.com/, is having a strange issue with OSE in that it is telling us our internal pages aren't linking to one another. An example of this is that it is showing our About page ( http://www.unionroom.com/about/ ) only having three links, but this link appears twice on every single page on the website (~200 pages) in the header and footer. We've hung around for a little while to see if OSE would correct itself, but it hasn't and this now suggests that it may be an issue with our in-linking structure. Can anyone spot any issues with our build? The rest of the websites that we produce, that are all built in the same way, all have healthy internal linking structures according to OSE. Very confusing! Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unionroom0 -
Do links to PDF's on my site pass "link juice"?
Hi, I have recently started a project on one of my sites, working with a branch of the U.S. government, where I will be hosting and publishing some of their PDF documents for free for people to use. The great SEO side of this is that they link to my site. The thing is, they are linking directly to the PDF files themselves, not the page with the link to the PDF files. So my question is, does that give me any SEO benefit? While the PDF is hosted on my site, there are no links in it that would allow a spider to start from the PDF and crawl the rest of my site. So do I get any benefit from these great links? If not, does anybody have any suggestions on how I could get credit for them. Keep in mind that editing the PDF's are not allowed by the government. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
Internal Links not being Identified on OSE
Greetings Mozzers, When ever I check my home page on OSE it says I have a total of 5 internal links. Obviously this is WAY off. I've used all relative links, if I were to removed all relative and make them absolute, would there be a better chance of OSE identifying them instead of losing that juice? I think this is huge to resolve as when I compare my site to competitors, almost all factors are in our favor except this huge gap of only 5 internal links. I'm using Drupal CMS. For example, Drupal normally outputs internal links as "/about" and "/about/team" in the menus. If we changed it to "https://monsterweb.net/about", and "https://monsterweb.net/about/team", would that make a difference? Thanks for all the advice and clarification on this matter.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
Unnatural Links Removal - are GWMT links enough?
Hi, When working on unnatural links penalty, is removing and disavowing links shown on the GWMT enough or should the list be broaden to include OSE and Majestic etc.? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Best links to gain?
Hi, Just a quick one to see what peoples thoughts are regarding links. I have just gained a free link on a .gov website in the UK. In one of their offers pages, will this provide any link value or domain trust to me and what can the benefits be SEO wise from having a link on a government domain? The link is just the website url with a a few lines of text detailing our address etc... so its not got any anchor text regarding targetting one of our brands. It is equallly, less or more important to target anchor text links to specific brands or to get good high quality links from trusted sites such as the .gov one I have linking to my root domain? The website is a local council website in the UK. And was listed by a member of their staff, who only list in the offer page if your offering discount to council members etc..., so its not a spammed page or anything like that. What are peoples views on anchor text links vs domain url links? Cheers Will
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YNWA0