Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
The Benefit of Internal Backwards Links in Product Descriptions
-
We want to work out if it is beneficial to use links pointing back to categories (higher up in the structure) on our website product pages.
For example, our Aria Dress by Jadore is found through the path: Home > Bridesmaid > Full Length Bridesmaids Dresses > Aria Dress
In the product description for the Aria Dress, is it beneficial to include internal links pointing back to higher branches in the website structure .e.g. the Full Length Bridesmaids Dresses category page, the Bridesmaid category page, as well as linking back to the 'Jadore' page? Will doing this for every dress (linking back to category page), improve the SEO of these category pages?
How many internal links is too many to include on any given product description?
Is it more important to ensure a direct link to every single webpage so that they can be reached by Google, or to include links in both directions .i.e. from Home > Product Category > Product, as well as from Product > Product Category?
Thank you.
-
nailed it!
-
It's certainly beneficial to link to wherever is going to help the user navigate. However, I would be hesitant to put actual links to higher branches in this case because it's likely that the visitor path has already been there and for them to navigate away from the product page would only deter them further to completing your checkout process.
If your current site architecture (read: nav bar in this case) doesn't already link out to the category/subcategory page, then yes, it may help slightly with internal linking "juice", but it will likely be negligible, and you could/should compensate this with things like XML sitemaps anyway.
Another thing to consider would be the opportunity to cross/upsell to other products. It's fairly easy - depending on the CMS you're using - to build in a widget or some kind of functionality to help cross promote products on product pages. I mention this because it's a great alternative to giving people the option to click away from something they probably know they already want, as well as allowing you to increase your price per order by making it easier for them to add "related products" to their shopping cart.
Not knowing your exact situation, I would advise making the internal linking structure whatever is best for the path of the visitor. Make up any internal linking benefit that you think you might be missing by making sure you're XML sitemaps are in order, as well as interlinking wherever necessary in other parts of your site.
Hope that helps!
Related resources:
https://moz.com/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts
http://www.screenpages.com/about/articles/ecommerce-navigation
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
-
Disavowing Links
I need some advice... I've noticed our link profile has increased with many comments links --- something I certainly have not pursued manually. I'm new to disavowing links. However, before I go ahead and disavow them, I'd like to ask how harmful these links are and would you recommend this is something I can do myself (relatively novice SEO) or if you'd recommend someone who could do this for a reasonable cost. In one instance, the link from this comment thread is with the anchor text, "porn"... Certainly not something we want to rank for, haha! I look forward to your advice
Link Building | | LukeBTDT0 -
If I disavow bad links on "disavow link webmaster" will they still show up on my moz reports?
We recently found out we have a lot of bad links linking back to our website from spam sites, I disavowed them through the google disavow link webmaster. On my moz report it still shows the links, is that normal?
Link Building | | Ryan.Cruz0 -
Nasty links
Hi My first q on here (hoorah!), and it's about links (boo!). I've got what appears to be a handful (but worryingly, increasing in number) of links pointing to my site like this: http://condos.mrgulffront.com/florida-condos-for-sale/320-scenic-gulf-drive-miramar-beach-fl-32550-mls-567591/ I've made contact with the sites concerned, and had only one positive response who flatly denied all knowledge of it. The issue (as far as I can see) is that as in the above example the links (on the bottom right in the grey box) are forever changing so not always visible. Can anyone offer any guidance as to these kinds of nasty links.... I'm right at the v beginning on this "path of seo understanding" so please don't assume prior knowledge! Thanks in advance.... tom
Link Building | | T-J-I0 -
What is a good ratio of total links to linking root domains?
Is 100 total links for every linking domain too high? I suppose I could also look at ratios of sites that are doing well in the rankings.
Link Building | | ProjectLabs0 -
Is there a tool to keep track of internal links?
I am looking for a tool that will help me keep track of internal links. We are working on a website that has roughly 500 pages of unique content. We are at a point where we plan to go through all of those pages and look for natural, internal link building opportunities (as well as pages that may have too many "over optimized" links). It would be really helpful to know the following for each page: 1. URL (we can extract this)
Link Building | | BlueTraffic
2. Meta Title (we can extract this)
3. Target Keywords (we can manually enter these) 4. Internal Links To Other Pages - A field (or fields) where we could manually enter the URL of each page that this page links to (including the anchor text used) Once all of this data is entered, it would be great if this tool could also count how many incoming links each page has (from other pages on the site) or somehow show which pages link to it. This would help to identify pages that have zero internal links. Do you know if a tool like this already exists, or even a spreadsheet with some functionality like this already built in? Thanks,
JC0 -
Changing links
Hi guys i wanted you views on changing the anchor text of links. I have quality links coming in but with year terms such as 2012 in there, if i want to change them all to 2013 for example would it be badly seen by Google? I cant say i feel comfortable about doing it but they are my links and are related to our products. Any advice much appreciated.
Link Building | | pauledwards0 -
Asking dealers for links if they sell your products:
Should you ask your dealers for links back to you? For example, if you are a laminate flooring manufacturer, should you ask all your retailers to link to you? If so, how do you go about it? Emails? A form letter? Should I create a page on the site for banners and let them grab the code? Any creative ideas would help.
Link Building | | kbloemendaal0 -
Helpful or Hurtfull / Distributor Links to Our site on every product page?
We have a distributor site with a page rank of 3 on its home page, and 0-1'ish on its product pages. While our manufacturing site is PR 4 getting close to 5... We are thinking about adding a link from our distributors product pages to our manufacturing appropriate material information page. This would be about 10k links spread out among 7 materials. We want to add these links to help our distributor sites customers, but we don't want to hurt our manufacturing site in the process. I personally don't know of any problem this would cause, but our manufacturing site is so important I need to verify adding this many links wouldn't hurt us. Your thoughts and knowledge is appreciated.
Link Building | | donford0