Internal Linking - Can You Over Do It?
-
Hi,
One of the sites I'm working on has a forum with thousands of pages, amongst thousands of other pages. These pages produce lots of organic search traffic... 200,000 per month.
We're using a bit of custom code to link relevant words and phrases from various discussion threads to hopefully related discussion pages. This generates thousands of links and up to 8 in-context links per page. A page could have anywhere from 200 to 3000 words in one to 50+ comments. Generally, a page with 200 words would have fewer of these automatically generated links, just because there are fewer terms naturally on the page.
Is there any possible problem with this, including but not limited to some kind of internal anchor text spam or anything else? We do it to knit together pages for link juice and hopefully user experience... giving them another page to go to. The pages we link to are all our pages that produce or we hope to produce organic search traffic from.
Thanks! ....Darcy
-
Good advice here. I hope you're linking out too, when it's helpful to your audience.
-
I doubt that the automated approach is a problem.
I like my approach because the anchor text will be natural language as written in the article. This gives a diversity of potential anchor text variations. All done naturally.
If your automated system allows you to provide multiple triggering words, then I would take every advantage of that. For example, if you have an article about widgets, I would load a large number of variations into the program like.....
green widgets, green widget, red widgets, red widget, blue widgets, blue widget, wooden widgets, wooden widget, brass widgets, brass widget, widgets, widget to produce a huge diversity of anchor texts).
..... to produce a huge diversity of anchor texts. Also note how "green widgets" and "green widget" are both present. I used an automatic system in the past and both variants were needed. Also, "widgets" and "widget" are listed at the end. That prevents the automated system from superseding two-word variations.
-
Hi Egol,
Thanks for the response. What do you see as the risks, if any, in our more automated approach?
Thanks... Darcy
-
Great response as always!
-
Here is what I do. I have not had any problems. These are article pages that I am talking about.
The first instance of any word or phrase for which I have an article is linked to that article. In any given article there are at least four or five of these links to a few dozen of these links. These links are manually placed as the article is posted.
From running CrazyEgg on my article pages, I know that these links get clicked. Some are clicked a surprising number of times. So, I am a strong advocate of this type of internal linking because it increases pageviews and readers must find it helpful because they are clicking these links a lot.
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
-
Site Migration Question - Do I Need to Preserve Links in Main Menu to Preserve Traffic or Can I Simply Link to on Each Page?
Hi There We are currently redesigning the following site https://tinyurl.com/y37ndjpn The local pages links in the main menu do provide organic search traffic. In order to preserve this traffic, would be wise to preserve these links in the main menu? Or could we have a secondary menu list (perhaps in the header or footer), featured on every page, which links to these pages? Many Thanks In Advance for Responses
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ruislip180 -
Link Building for Ecommerce
I need help - I'm trying to boost the rankings of a competitive category page - Leather Office Chairs First I'm thinking I need earned links - but for something like leather office chairs thinking of interesting, unique content people would love to read & share is proving difficult. I am struggling - can anyone help?!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
International SEO Options?
Hi we currently have a site which is a example.com domain in the Australian market (we have geo-targeted to Australia within search console). We are looking to expand to United States. I have added the potential options down below, just wondering which one you guys think would be best from a SEO and practical standpoint? Or if there are other options i should consider? Option 1 The Australian domain is strong so this option takes this into consideration. Keep example.com (Australian) Add on: Sub-Directory for US Which would be: example.com/us/ In Search Console set the sub-folder to target US and also setup hreflang tags. Setup the US site on the sub-directory. Option 2 Add sub-folders for both Aus and US example/au/ (Australian)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jaynamarino
example/us/ (United States) Setup hreflang targeting. Cons
Need to set up redirects for the current site to new location which is .com/au/ might also see drop in performance due to redirects. Cheers.0 -
Any idea why Google Search Console stopped showing "Internal Links" and "Links to your site"
Our default eCommerce property (https://www.pure-elegance.com) used to show several dozen External Links and several thousand Internal Links on Google Search Console. As of this Friday both those links are showing "No Data Available". I checked other related properties (https://pure-elegance.com, http:pure-elegance.com and http://www.pure-elegance.com) and all of them are showing the same. Our other statistics (like Search Analytics etc.) remain unchanged. Any idea what might have caused this and how to resolve this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SudipG0 -
Affiliate Links Dilemma
Hello everyone. Our e-commerce website virtualsheetmusic.com has several hundreds affiliate incoming links, and many of them are "follow" links. I thought to redirect all incoming affiliate links to a "intermediate" page excluded by the robots.txt file in order to avoid any possible "commercial links" penalty from Google, but I now face a dilemma... most of our best referral links are affiliate links, by excluding those links from our back link profile could give us a big hit in terms of rankings. How would you solve this dilemma? What would you suggest doing in this sort of cases?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Inbound Affiliate Links: can this solution help?
Hello everyone, I have a pretty large e-commerce website and a bunch (about 1,000) affiliates using our in-house affiliate system we built several years ago (about 12 years ago?). All our affiliates link to us as follows: http://mywebsite.com/page/?aff=[aff_nickname] Then our site parses the request, stores a cookie to track the user, then 301 redirects to the clean page URL below: http://mywebsite.com/page/ Since 2013 we require all affiliates to link to us by using the rel="nofollow" tag to avoid any penalties, but I still see a lot of affiliate links not using the nofollow or old affiliates that have not updated their pages. So... I was reading on this page from Google, that any possible "scheme" penalization can be fixed by using either the nofollow tag or by using an intermediate page listed on the robots.txt file: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en Do you think that could really be a reliable solution to avoid any possible penalization coming from affiliate links not using the "nofollow" tag? I have searched and read around the web but I couldn't find any real answer to my question. Thanks in advance to anyone. Best, Fab.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Backlinks to internal pages
Hi, Our website of 3K+ pages currently has more links coming to internal pages (2nd & 3rd Level), compared to links to homepage. Just wanted to know if this is bad for rankings ? Please share your thoughts. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Umesh-Chandra0 -
Number of Links for Internal E-commerce Search Pages (and Anchor Text)
Hello! We have an internal search engine for different email, postal, and phone data products on our website (75,000 product pages... calling all direct marketers!), I've noindexed all our dynamic search pages, but I'm wondering how else I can improve these pages. Should I reduce the amount of links on each page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
Currently there are 20 search results per page. " <variable>Mailing List" has been a pretty good source of traffic for our product pages.
Should I change the anchor text for all the product pages listed to include the added long-tail keyword, or would that be extremely spammy, having the word "Mailing List" 20+ times on my page? We have both static and dynamic search pages - here is one of static ones: http://www.consumerbase.com/direct-marketing-mailing-lists.html
My main problem with adding the long tail KWs to the anchor text is that we still want our static search pages indexed.</variable> Thanks!0