In Chapter 2, we discussed the importance of hing a crawlable website. Part of a website’s crawlability lies in its internal linking structure. When you link to other pages on your website, you ensure that search engine crawlers can find all your site’s pages, you pass link equity (ranking power) to other pages on your site, and you help visitors nigate your site.
For example, if we wanted to emphasize the importance of our newly updated SEO Beginner's Guide, we'd simply add a link like that! (and it's a really good guide)
The importance of internal linking is well established, but there can be confusion over how this looks in practice.
Link accessibilityLinks that require a click (like a nigation drop-down to view) are often hidden from search engine crawlers, so if the only links to internal pages on your website are through these types of links, you may he trouble getting those pages indexed. Opt instead for links that are directly accessible on the page.
Anchor textAnchor text is the text with which you link to pages. Below, you can see an example of what a hyperlink without anchor text and a hyperlink with anchor text would look like in the HTML.
Keyword TextOn live view, that would look like this:
http://www.example.com/ Keyword TextThe anchor text sends signals to search engines regarding the content of the destination page. For example, if I link to a page on my site using the anchor text “learn SEO,” that’s a good indicator to search engines that the targeted page is one at which people can learn about SEO. Be careful not to overdo it, though. Too many internal links using the same, keyword-stuffed anchor text can appear to search engines that you’re trying to manipulate a page’s ranking. It’s best to make anchor text natural rather than formulaic.
Link volumeIn Google’s General Webmaster Guidelines, they say to “limit the number of links on a page to a reasonable number (a few thousand at most).” This is part of Google’s technical guidelines, rather than the quality guideline section, so hing too many internal links isn’t something that on its own is going to get you penalized, but it does affect how Google finds and evaluates your pages.
The more links on a page, the less equity each link can pass to its destination page. A page only has so much equity to go around.
So it’s safe to say that you should only link when you mean it! You can learn more about link equity from our SEO Learning Center.
Aside from passing authority between pages, a link is also a way to help users nigate to other pages on your site. This is a case where doing what’s best for search engines is also doing what’s best for searchers. Too many links not only dilute the authority of each link, but they can also be unhelpful and overwhelming. Consider how a searcher might feel landing on a page that looks like this:
Welcome to our gardening website! We he many articles on gardening, how to garden, and helpful tips on herbs, fruits, vegetables, perennials, and annuals. Learn more about gardening from our gardening blog.Whew! Not only is that a lot of links to process, but it also reads pretty unnaturally and doesn’t contain much substance (which could be considered “thin content” by Google). Focus on quality and helping your users nigate your site, and you likely won’t he to worry about too many links.
RedirectionRemoving and renaming pages is a common practice, but in the event that you do move a page, make sure to update the links to that old URL! At the very least, you should make sure to redirect the URL to its new location, but if possible, update all internal links to that URL at the source so that users and crawlers don’t he to pass through redirects to arrive at the destination page. If you choose to redirect only, be careful to oid redirect chains that are too long (Google says, "Avoid chaining redirects... keep the number of redirects in the chain low, ideally no more than 3 and fewer than 5.")
Example of a redirect chain:
(original location of content) example.com/location1 → example.com/location2 → (current location of content) example.com/location3Better:
example.com/location1 → example.com/location3