Too many Internal Links: A good thing or bad thing?
-
According to Moz i have over 500 links on some pages, GWT says about 400 with most (90%) having about 210 links.
When I eyeball the site it should have no more than 30 to 40, but my web agency tells me its because the way the CMS works (DotNetNuke) that all pages are linked via the top navigation.
Does this mean that my internal linking strategy is flawed before i even start to consider which pages I want to have more links to?
Our site www.over50choices.co.uk was rebranded & moved to the new CMS in June 2013.
Should i be concerned or is this OK?
Ash
-
Too many internal links is no doubt a bad thing which should be corrected as soon as possible. While there is no magic number you need to adhere to, you will want to keep your internal links to as small a number as possible. The main reason for this is because the more links you have, the lesser pagerank you are going to pass to each link (read more about that here: http://moz.com/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many).
Find out where does all the internal links actually link to, and decide which ones you don't want to pass link juice to and eliminate those links. If all these internal links are a result of your CMS, you might want to consider changing to another CMS.
-
Yep, it looks that way to me... Unless you reduce the amount of links in your CMS, the links you manually put into the content will not have much value. While it is normal that some CMS' might have navigation links in the source code that a user doesn't see, the amount of 400-500 seems way over the top... Maybe you might have to reconsider site architecture in general?
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
-
Internal Linking Conundrum
Hello I have a web site with a menu structure with three levels Top Level (Single Item) > First Level (Single Item) > Second Level (Multiple Items) The first level pages do not rank well. The top level and second level pages rank well. Search Console acknowledges 600 internal links to the top level. 600 to the second level. But only 100 to the first level. This is true across 6 top level items. It is not to do with page level links. It just isn't acknowledging all the links to the first level. Does anyone know why this might be? Thanks for any assistance you can give me.
Web Design | | Andrew-SEO0 -
Keyword optimization when two keywords mean the same thing
How does one best go about optimizing a page, meta title, and meta description for two keyword when the two keywords mean the same thing (e.g. attorney vs. lawyer). It's awfully tedious, obnoxious, and spammy-looking to keep putting "attorney/lawyer," "attorney-lawyer," or "attorney or lawyer" into content, titles, and descriptions.
Web Design | | micromano1 -
Dealing with the impending Google mobile compliance update - is bMobilized any good as a temporary measure?
We've been caught a bit off guard with the upcoming Google mobile compliance issue and received the warnings in webmasters about fixing mobile usability issues. It will still be some time before we can have the site re-coded as responsive. I have stumbled upon a converter tool (which turns any site into one that's mobile friendly) called bMobilized, which essentially turns your site into one that's mobile friendly. Have you used bMobilized? Is it a safe idea to use this service temporarily until our new responsive site is ready in a few months? Do you have any suggestions for temporarily getting around the mobile compliance issue while our new responsive site is being built? Thanks
Web Design | | Martin_S0 -
Do Follow Link In Footer Only: How Do I Do it?
In a past Q&A forum about web design companies adding footer links to the websites they make, I really liked Irving Weisses' solution where he stated: "I think the best solution is a dofollow homepage ONLY footer link. This is the highest PR page, usually the most traffic so good visibility for advertising, you're not creating tons of sitewide links with identical anchor texts, and the owner is only leaking some PR on their homepage." I want to implement this but would like to know the best way to do this. I deal Wordpress 95% of the time. Is there a plugin or CSS code that would allow me to put a Do follow link in the footer but make the link disappear on all the other pages? Thanks in advanced everyone 🙂 Wesley Barras, Houston, TX
Web Design | | Wesley-Barras0 -
Domain Consolidation & Proper Linking Strategy?
We have a client that operates 5 gyms in 5 different part of Miami, and each gym has its own website. All sites rank well and have a a good pagerank. For the purpose of their marketing and brand they would like 1 website developed which includes all of their gyms which we are launching later today. Each gym will have it's own landing page within the website Should we redirect the URL's of the different websites to the individual landing pages on the new site or how should that work to minimize any penalties on our SEO. For example (these are fake url's): www.gymA.com, www.gymB.com, www.gymC.com, www.gymD.com The new url: www.gym.com New landing pages:
Web Design | | POPCreative
www.gym.com/gymA, www.gym.com/gymB, www.gym.com/gymC, www.gym.com/gymD Should we do a redirect from: www.gymA.com to www.gym.com/gymA www.gymB.com to www.gym.com/gymB www.gymC.com to www.gym.com/gymC www.gymD.com to www.gym.com/gymD Thank you in advanced. If there is a better way to do this, or anything extra I need to know, that would be great. Thanks!0 -
Too Many On Page Links, rel="nofollow" and rel="external"
Hi, Though similar to other questions on here I haven't found any other examples of sites in the same position as mine. It's an e-commerce site for mobile phones that has product pages for each phone we sell. Each tariff that is available on each phone links through to the checkout/transfer page on the respective mobile phone network. Therefore when the networks offer 62 different tariffs that are available on a single phone that means we automatically start with 62 on page links that helps to quickly tip us over the 100 link threshold. Currently, we mark these up as rel="external" but I'm wondering if there isn't a better way to help the situation and prevent us being penalised for having too many links on page so: Can/should we mark these up as rel="nofollow" instead of, or as well as, rel="external"? Is it inherently a problem from a technical SEO point of view? Does anyone have any similar experiences or examples that might help myself or others? As always, any help or advice would be much appreciated 🙂
Web Design | | Tinhat0 -
How can I reduce my warnings for excesive links on our site?
Our campaign overview shows well over 100 warnings that could be hurting our google ranking based on excessive links on pages. Each page listed, however, is simply due to listing the brands we carry, and linking to the products. Is there a way to do this without hurting our ranking? A better way than linking, perhaps? Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | guycochran0 -
What's the best way to sculpt links on a page?
I know PR isn't a top ranking factor anymore, so "PR sculpting" isn't something to focus on. But isn't it still true that having more links that you need on any given page is worse than having fewer, in terms of that page's authority? I'm managing a site that has a lot of navigational links in the footer, which are duplicative because they're almost all included in the top nav bar, and several are triplicated in the sidebar as well. I wanted to remove 85% of these duplicative links from the footer, thinking they diluted the page authority and that most users probably won't scroll there anyway when we launch the site. The site owner is pushing back, though, not wanting to remove so many links because he believes they might be useful to some users. We can test our respective user-behavior theories after launching, but right now I have two questions: Will having a sizable number of duplicative links in the footer dilute the page's authority? and 2) Are there any other ways to reduce this dilution, aside from simply removing the links? (I know nofollow is not the answer, but possibly using iframes or Java or something like that?)
Web Design | | KyleJB0