Internal page links and possible penalties
-
If one looks at a page on our client's website, (http://truthbook.com/urantia-book/paper-98-the-melchizedek-teachings-in-the-occident for example), there are a huge amount of links in the body of the page. All internal links are normal links. All external links arerel="nofollow" class="externallink"
We have two questions: 1. Could we be being penalized by google for having too many links on these pages? Will this show i our webmaster reports?
2. If we are being penalized, can we keep the links (and have no penalty) if we made the internal links rel="nofollow" class="externallink" as well? We need these internal links to help people use these pages as an educational tool. This is why these pages also have audio and imagery.
Thank you
-
This is a book they're presenting on their site, of course it's not unique content. I'm sure they're aware of that.
OP, to your questions:
1. Generally you won't be penalized for having too many links on a page, but Google will only crawl so many of them. The higher authority your site is, you can have tons of links on a page and get more of them crawled.
2. What makes you think you're being penalized? Significant drop in traffic?
-
The big concern with a page like this, is that this is not unique content. I copied and pasted a line from the text into google with quotes: "Having grown out of the earlier religious forms of worship of the family gods" and found many pages with the exact same content, the book posted.
Worrying about 'optimizing' duplicate content is a no win game. You need to create new content. If you have duplicate content like this, you need to add a significant amount of additional value to it to make it unique. You could NoIndex these pages as well, as there are certainly times it makes sense to have duplicate content on your site, for the users benefit.
-
1. Could we be being penalized by google for having too many links on these pages? Will this show i our webmaster reports?
Penalized, no, not likely. If so Wikipedia would be in trouble. You do however pass less link power for each link.
2. If we are being penalized, can we keep the links (and have no penalty) if we made the internal links rel="nofollow" class="externallink" as well? We need these internal links to help people use these pages as an educational tool. This is why these pages also have audio and imagery.
It is perfectly natural and even beneficial to link to relevant topics inside you page, both internally and externally. As mentioned above the thing to pay most attention to is, that you do not dilute very important pages with a multitude of in-significant links.
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 links to landing pages
Hi, we are in the process of building a new website and we have 12 different locations and for theses 12 locations we have landing pages with unique copy on the following: 1. Marketing...2 SEO....3. PPC....4. Web Design Therefor there are 48 landing pages. The marketing pages are the most important ones to us in terms of traffic and priority. My question is: 1. Should we put a dropdown of the are pages in the main header under locations that link to the area marketing pages? 2. What is the best way to link all the sub pages such as London Web Design? Should these links just be coming off the London marketing page? or should we have a sitemap in the footer that lists every page? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
What is future of Link building ? Any link building experts Here ?
Hey Everyone, its Muhammad Umair Ghufran I have one question about Link Building ? As my Knowledge Google Love the Quality content but Link building rank some low quality website Right ? So, what is the future of link building ; please explain indeep with complete reference for better understanding Thanks Regards: Muhammad Umair Ghufran
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muhammadumairghufran0 -
Backlinks to internal pages
Hi, Our website of 3K+ pages currently has more links coming to internal pages (2nd & 3rd Level), compared to links to homepage. Just wanted to know if this is bad for rankings ? Please share your thoughts. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Umesh-Chandra0 -
Internal links question
I've read that Google frowns upon large numbers of internal links. We're building a site that helps users browse a list of shows via dozens of genres. If the genres are expose, say, as a pulldown menu as opposed to a list of static links, and selecting the pulldown option filters the list of shows, would those genres count against our internal links count?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Are these Bad Internal Links/Anchor Text?
Hi my site www.over50choices.co.uk is 4 months old and I wondered whether my "Quick Links" section (right hand column) on 95% of my pages with the same/similar anchor text was not best practice ie should I vary the anchor text & the target locations more? ( they tend to point to my top 6 pages) They were set up originally to make the customer experience easy to find things but from what i have read Google doesnt like too many links looking the same ! I also have 3 Graphics (cross sales messages) just above the foot of most (not the home page) pages, linking to my 3 key value pages, all with similar Alt Text tags, again should i vary the alt text or is not a good idea to have this type of link on every page? What is best practice, as i am trying to balance the visual/customer experience whilst optimising for search? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep1
Ash0 -
What's the news on sitwide nofollow links and anchor text penalties
Is it possible to be penalized for sitewide nofollow links because of anchor text penalties, even if you use branded anchor text?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Internal Site Structure Question (URL Formation and Internal Link Design)
Hi, I have an e-commerce website that has an articles section: There is an articles.aspx file that can be reached from the top menu and it holds links to all of the articles as follows: xxx.com/articles/article1.aspx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
xxx.com/articles/article2.aspx I want to add several new articles under a new sections, for example a complete set of articles under the title of "buying guide" and the question is what would be the best way? I was thinking of adding a "computers-buying-guides.aspx" accessible from the top menu / footer and from it linking to: xxx.com/computer-buying-ghudes/what-to-check-prior-to-buying-a-laptop.aspx
xxx.com/computer-buying-ghudes/weight-vs-performance.aspx
etc. Any thoughts / recommendations? Thanks0 -
Internal Anchor Text Penalty Clarification
I believe we may be seeing the initial stages of a penalty for over-using internal anchor text on our ecommerce site. Per Rand and other training, we added related product links and popular category links to our product and category pages. At the time, we did not have an html sitemap in the footer. We're a small to medium sized site with 1,700+ products. We have since added an html sitemap of our categories to our footer. Now we have category links in the sitemap and category pages and product pages with targeted anchor text. I'm beginning to see downward movement on some of those targeted categories. If I have an html sitemap in the footer (category index) should I get rid of the popular category links throughout the rest of the site? Also, with more frequency, I'm seeing a "product index" and "category index" in footers. Is this a best practice? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0