Do we know if inbalanced anchor text distribution also applies to internal links?
-
I have the pages of my site linked together very well with editorial links in my copy and blog posts. But now I'm starting to wonder post-penguin if it's a problem if all my internal links to a certain page have the same anchor text? Or is my internal link juice not powerful enough to set off a red flag? I don't think I've seen this addressed anywhere or if we even know the answer to this or can only speculate.
-
That's a good theory. It's not like I've loaded internal links in every other sentence of every blog post. I only did it where it would help the customer by giving them more information. Between all my blog posts, I think each post ranges from 0-4 links, 4 being a rare occasion, one or two being the most common. I guess I'm not too worried, since post-penguin we are now #1.
-
This is a great question, and from some posts I've seen it seems that plugins like SEO Smart Links have caused issues with Penguin: http://www.itechcode.com/2012/05/19/vital-seo-tips-after-penguin-algorithm-update/
So I would say yes. Be careful using things like SEO Smart Links or KB Linker, as they can cause you to unnaturally link certain words all the time, in a way that is not good for user experience either.
It's harder when you are talking navigation, etc, but I posit (and I have no proof of this) that menus and such are not as at-risk to be hit with Penguin as overdone in context links.
As we always say, what would users expect to see? Give them that.
Hope this helps
-
Hi Marisa,
This is a good question and one I could only really speculate on but here is my thinking:
We know that Google likes links to be natural (or at least look natural) hence the focus on over-optimization in the recent update. So it would be natural to assume that Google will be looking for the same thing with internal links. This then raises the question what would look natural for internal links? Of course, as the website owner has control over the internal links, it would be safe to assume that most (if not all) internal links are going to have the same anchor text. This is just natural. However, external links are completely different and it would certainly look unnatural if all the anchors were the same commercial term.
Anyway, that's my thoughts.
Adam.
-
Hi Marisa,
from everything I've read about Penguin and it is quite a bit I would practice the same best practices for internal links as I did for external links. Never make a link over 115 characters is the rule from Google I would just make sure you avoid them thinking your keyword stuffing even though you most likely are just building your site correctly. On page anchor text aside from the length are not yet part of Penguin. Here's a list of some of the on page things they look for.
- Pages Where The Title is Missing or Empty* Duplicate Page Content Analysis* Duplicate Page Title Analysis* Pages That have Long URLs (> 115 characters)* Overly-Dynamic URL Analysis* Meta Refresh Analysis* Pages Where the Title Element is Too Short* Pages Where the Title Element is Too Long (> 70 Characters)* Pages Containing Too Many On-Page Links* Missing Meta Description Tag Analysis* Robots.txt Analysis* Meta-robots Nofollow Analysis* Meta-robots Analysis* Canonical Tags Analysis* Indexed URLs Analysis* Total URLs Receiving Traffic* Total Keywords Sending Traffic
I will look in detail for you on this and get a much better answer I apologize things are hectic right now.
Sincerely,
Thomas von Zickell
-
Thanks. That's good basic information about anchor text in general, but says nothing about how it relates to Penguin.
-
I hope this helps http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/internal-link
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
-
GWT shows 38 external links from 8 domains to this PDF - But it shows no links and no authority in OSE
Hi All, I found one other discussion about the subject of PDFs and passing of PageRank here: http://moz.com/community/q/will-a-pdf-pass-pagerank But this thread didn't answer my question so am posting it here. This PDF: http://www.ccisolutions.com/jsp/pdf/YAM-EMX_SERIES.PDF is reported by GWT to have 38 links coming from 8 unique domains. I checked the domains and some of them are high-quality relevant sites. Here's the list: Domains and Number of Links
Technical SEO | | danatanseo
prodiscjockeyequipment.com 9
decaturilmetalbuildings.com 9
timberlinesteelbuildings.com 6
jaymixer.com 4
panelsteelbuilding.com 4
steelbuildingsguide.net 3
freedocumentsearch.com 2
freedocument.net 1 However, when I plug the URL for this PDF into OSE, it reports no links and a Page Authority if only "1". This is not a new page. This is a really old page. In addition to that, when I check the PageRank of this URL, the PageRank is "nil" - not even "0" - I'm currently working on adding links back to our main site from within our PDFs, but I'm not sure how worthwhile this is if the PDFs aren't being allocated any authority from the pages already linking to them. Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions? Thanks all!0 -
Should I add 'nofollow' to site wide internal links?
I am trying to improve the internal linking structure on my site and ensure that the most important pages have the most internal links pointing to them (which I believe is the best strategy from Google's perspective!). I have a number of internal links in the page footer going to pages such as 'Terms and Conditions', 'Testimonials', 'About Us' etc. These pages, therefore, have a very large number of links going to them compared with the most important pages on my site. Should I add 'nofollow' to these links?
Technical SEO | | Pete40 -
Page for Link Building
Hello Guys, My question is about a link building process. We all know that some directories/sites do require a reciprocal link. Does it make any sense to creat a page in website exclusively to reciprocal links? And what we do with this webpage in terms of indexing, do folow, crawling...etc. Any sugestions are more then welcome 🙂 Tks in advance! PP
Technical SEO | | PedroM0 -
How do I remove Links to my website???
Hi Guys, Please can anyone help!! Can anyone tell me how on earth I can remove links to my website? My website has been hit by the new penguin update and the company that was doing my SEO seems to have built a lot of spammy links!! How can I remove these links??? Please can anyone help Thanks Gareth
Technical SEO | | GAZ090 -
Different links to to the same page
Hi, Based on the user's actions we post activity into users Facebook timeline. And each activity has link back to our particular page on our website. For example if original page was: www.Domain.com from Facebook timeline it would be like this: www.Domain.com?Ffb_action_ids=101508953168 Do you think this will have a negative effect on our page rankings as we will eded up having a lot of different URL's to the same page? www.Domain.com?Ffb_action_ids=101508953168 www.Domain.com?Ffb_action_ids=456788765609 etc.. Thank you, Karen Bdoyan
Technical SEO | | showme0 -
Internal links to low value pages
Hi, We're doing a big content update on our product pages and I'm looking for some advice about our internal linking. In a nutshell, the current design we're using links out from every product page (i.e. plants) to a set of accessory pages (i.e. things to help you plant the plants). The screenshot shows how this works. The accessories we sell are a very small part of our business and don't attract significant or valuable search traffic. It's the plant pages that pull in the visits and make the money.
Technical SEO | | jdeb
The reason for all these links to accessory pages is for usabilty & to reduce the volume of support calls about accessories (we get a lot of those). So my concern is that by linking out to these relatively low value accessory pages from all of our plant product pages, we will be spilling link juice from all our important pages to a small set of unimportant ones. Should I be concerned about this and if so, what should I do differently? I have considered: Making an intermediary page, listing the relevant accessories, so that each product page links to one intermediary page, which then links to all the accessories. Using nofollow on the accessory page links - there is so much info out there about this, much of it conflicting, that I just don't know if that's a good or bad idea. Using some kind of java-based pop-up box to list the accessory links that will hide the links from spiders. Linking back from the accessory pages to the relevant product sub-category pages to loop the flow of link juice. All ideas welcome zoBgC0 -
Best free tool to check internal broken links
Question says it all I guess. What would your recommend as the best free tool to check internal broken links?
Technical SEO | | RikkiD225 -
What should I do about links coming in that are from link farm type sites?
I just noticed two back links to a couple of sites around pharmaceuticals/attorneys. The one link is to a chinese site with url: http://e.lifestyle.com.cn/fashionweekly/nzj/353093_2.shtml, and the other is to a site called Adroo: http://adroo.com/us/?view=list&list_id=104154&lang=en. Both appear to be some type of link farm sites, one has come in as a nofollow (surprise, you can buy "ads" on their site, both have decent DA. There is no reason for them to link to theses sites, should I find a way to stop the link? Also, on one of the sites we had a dmoz link and it is not showing in OSE? Link is still open in dmoz though. Thanks for any input.
Technical SEO | | RobertFisher0