What is the effect of too many internal links on a page?
-
Hi there! We have been doing a great effort during the last year but our main competitor is still above us in search rankings. Basically, the main differente remains now in the number of internal links, specially in our homepage. We have more than 200 and they only have around 100, so I think we are wasting too much link power among some irrelevant pages. What could be the effect of this?
-
I think that I would use the homepage to promote my most profitable, most brandable and most linkable content. After adopting that philosophy I would increase/decrease the number of links on my homepage to see what produces the most visitor engagement and conversions.
But, getting to your original question... if you are getting your butt kicked in the SERPs you need to go out after links and likes and produce more of the content that attracts them. SEO is a battle of resources and those resources are linkable content and links/likes, etc.
-
Then you're effectively dividing your link juice much more than they are. This is mostly still relevant - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-juice-is-loose
Edit - Wait I take that back, using nofollow to sculpt page rank isn't a recommendation I would give. It still works a bit but I simply want you to watch that video and understand how link juice flows around a site.
Some things you may want to try are to reduce the number of links and only have converting or money making pages linked to from the home page and building links from other sites directly into the subpages.
Building links directly into subpages should have the greatest effect.
Edit - But please don't just chop off links without thinking about it, take some time to work out how you want Googlebot and visitors to move around your site and make sure that you still have links into ALL the pages on your site (but not necessarily from the homepage).
Also, check if all the subpages are being cached regularly, if not then it's probably a fair assumption Google's not working it's way through all your links.
-
If I did understand well, that's exactly what is happening. We're outranking them for the most important keyword for our homepage (which is the same keyword for them) but they're beating us up in all deeper pages - even if we have a very similar structure...
And our domain and homepage has a better link profile than theirs according to Open Site Explorer.
-
I think that 100 links is just a guideline rather than a hard rule. I believe that your most relevant links, your sitemap index and other indispensible links should be only placed on the homepage. The idea of the homepage is to have links leading to the most important links to your next level of links (category links). If you have a page with more than 100 links means that you have a bad hiearchy in terms of Google. I wouldnt advocate it.
-
If I can just add a thought for you as well, assuming your homepage is the one ranking for the keyword that your competitor is beating you on, the PR isn't being distributed until AFTER the link juice is being accounted for, i.e. The homepage still has 50 linkjuice points (I just made that up) which are split between 200 links vs your competitors 50 LJP (but I'm going to keep using it) being split among 100 links; basically the ranking factor of the links should only occur further down your site structure.
What may be a factor with those links is whether you're linking off the page with your main keyword to a subpage. So if you want your homepage to rank for 'keyword' having an exact match anchor link with the text 'keyword' may have some effect.
-
Hi Candida,
The link juice of the homepage is splitted between the 200 links of the page, SEOMoz recommends about 100 links per page. This may not be the cause of the ranking difference, but you should consider removing the links to the less important pages.
If you wish to make a more important change to your linking architecture, you should follow a pyramidal architecture as described in several seomoz articles :
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/internal-link
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/diagrams-for-solving-crawl-priority-indexation-issues
-
Hi Candida,
Long time ago Google was recommending 100 Links per page and it was one of their Guidelines, But they don't anymore. (Matt Cutts Reference it in this Video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6g5hoBYlf0)
Try to audit your 200 links and see if all the links are important and adds value to your visitor. but IMO i don't think there is an effect of you having 100 or 200 links more in consideration of your SERPs.
Try to use Linkscape and see your competitor links, and try to pull and acquire the most relevant links linking to your competitor.
Cheers
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
-
Product Page Links
I have a product category page at https://www.hurtlegear.com.au/s1000rr/ which currently has 38 products on it. Problem is, all the product titles start with the name of the text: "bmw s1000rr" (because that's what they are) - so that means there are 38 anchored internal links on that page, all starting with the same keyword. You can see how that might look to the Google crawler. Recently that page dropped from around 15 to outside the top 100, and Moz tells me that the page is keyword stuffed with "bmw s1000rr" (no suprise) so I'm guessing that may be the reason the page has disappeared out of the SERPs. I don't really want to change all the product titles (then they wouldn't make sense) so I'm just wondering if there is any way around this? Is there some way of telling Google that this is a product category page and therefore to ignore the anchor text in all of those product links? Can/should the links have some kind of markup on them? Or is the page beyond help? Basically I'm looking at a way of keeping the product titles as they are, but avoiding a page penalty from Google somehow. I'm a bit of a newbie, any suggestions would be most appreciated. Cheers, Graeme
On-Page Optimization | | graeme720 -
Reducing multi-page website to one page & SEO ramifications?
Hello there! I just want to check in before I do this. I am reducing a multi-page website to one page (temporarily, but for at least 4-6 months). I will be 301 redirecting all old pages to the one, new home page. The new home page has a lot more content, long and short keyword phrases. Aside from losing the benefit of internal links, will reducing the number of website pages hurt a ranking? Does having associated keywords on other website pages provide benefit to another (in this case Home) page? Thanks so much for your invaluable advice!
On-Page Optimization | | lulu710 -
301 redirects from several sub-pages to one sub-page
Hi! I have 14 sub-pages i deleted earlier today. But ofcourse Google can still find them, and gives everyone that gives them a go a 404 error. I have come to the understading that this wil hurt the rest of my site, at least as long as Google have them indexed. These sub-pages lies in 3 different folders, and i want to redirect them to a sub-page in a folder number 4. I have already an htaccess file, but i just simply cant get it to work! It is the same file as i use for redirecting trafic from mydomain.no to www.mydomain.no, and i have tried every kind of variation i can think of with the sub-pages. Has anyone perhaps had the same problem before, or for any other reason has the solution, and can help me with how to compose the htaccess file? 🙂 You have to excuse me if i'm using the wrong terms, missing something i should have seen under water while wearing a blindfold, or i am misspelling anything. I am neither very experienced with anything surrounding seo or anything else that has with internet to do, nor am i from an englishspeaking country. Hope someone here can light up my path 🙂 Thats at least something you can say in norwegian...
On-Page Optimization | | MarieA1 -
Excessive Internal Links & links to same location
Hi, When Google is counting internal links on a page and it comes across two links to the same url, do both of the links count towards Excessive Internal Links? The reason I ask is that on our website we allow users to navigate through the website in different ways (either by dropdown menus or side menu or through breadcrumbs); which cause some links to appear multiple times on the same page. Any thoughts? K.
On-Page Optimization | | soltec0 -
Should H1s be used in the logo? If they are and it is dynamic on each page to relate to the page content, is this detrimental to the site rather than having it in the page content?
On some sites, the H1 is contained within the logo and remains consistent throughout the site (i.e. the company name is in the of the logo). If the h1 in a logo is dynamic for each page (i.e. on the homepage it is company name - homepage) is this better or worse to have it changed out on the logo rather than having it in the page content?
On-Page Optimization | | CabbageTree0 -
Home page ranking dropped below internal pages
The index page for a site I manage has dropped significantly - internal pages rank above it. It's a new site, 2 months old but was ranking at 1st. Any suggestions as to how I can debug this?
On-Page Optimization | | OptioPublishing0 -
Creating New Pages Versus Improving Existing Pages
What are some things to consider or things to evaluate when deciding whether you should focus resources on creating new pages (to cover more related topics) versus improving existing pages (adding more useful information, etc.)?
On-Page Optimization | | SparkplugDigital0 -
Too many On-Page Links on a WP based Website
Hi, I've already browsed through various of the Q&As on the "too many On-Page links" issue, but I would really need some advice concerning a WP Site with a dropdown navigation. As outlined in the on-page report, every site has about 180 outgoing links, which pretty much is the number of site featured in the navigation. Even though the 100 link limit is somewhat outdated I'm still worried about the distribution of linkjuice from the starting page and how Google perceives the importance of the various pages. Would it make sense to adapt the structure of the navigation, so that the starting page only links to the 5 category pages and the category pages only link to the detail pages they contain? The site has good rankings for several pages and I assume that Google can tell that the large number of links is caused by the navigation. But with every page having appr. 180 links it may be difficult for Google to tell, which of those pages are the most important regarding internal link structure... Looking foward to your opinion and insights! Cheers, Chris
On-Page Optimization | | adwordize0