What is internal linking for SEO?
Internal links are links that go from one page on a website to another page on the same website. They are commonly used in main navigation to help people find their way around a website. Internal links are also helpful for establishing information hierarchy and spreading link equity (ranking power) around websites.
Internal links are links that go from one page on a website to another page on the same website. They help people navigate websites, figure out information hierarchies, and share ranking power between websites.
Why Are Internal Links Important for SEO?
Internal links are important for SEO because they help Google find, index and understand all of the pages on your website. If you use them correctly, internal links can help send authority (or “PageRank”) to important pages.
Internal linking is very important for any website that wants higher rankings in Google search results. You should use keyword-rich anchor text in your internal links. This is a good practice because it helps Google understand your site’s content. However, you should not use the same anchor text for backlinks, as this can hurt your site’s ranking.
SEO Best Practice
SEO is important for making sure your website is easy to find and looks good to people who are looking for it. Internal links are a good way to help make your site’s architecture clear, and they also help pass on “link equity” (or how strong a link from one page to another is). So, in this section, we’ll talk about how to build an SEO-friendly site architecture using internal links.
In order for search engines to list pages in their indices, they need to see the content on the page. They also need access to a structure that lets spiders browse the pathways of a website so they can find all of the pages on the website. Hundreds of thousands of websites make a mistake by hiding or burying their main link navigation. This makes it difficult for search engines to find their pages and list them in their indexes.
Structural Internal Links & Site Architecture
The best way to set up the internal links on your website is to use a pyramid structure. This will help keep the number of links between the homepage and any given page to a minimum. This helps the ranking power of each page on the website by allowing it to flow throughout the site. This is common on many high-performing websites, like Amazon.com, in the form of category and subcategory systems.
You can improve your website’s ranking by using internal links and supplementary URL structures. For example, you can link to a page on your website with the anchor text “cats.” The format for a correctly formatted internal link is below.
Links in Submission-Required Forms
Links in submission-required forms will not be crawled or indexed by search engines. This means that any content or links that are accessible through a form will not be visible to the engines.
Links Only Accessible Through Internal Search Boxes
Spiders will not try to find your content for you. That’s why it’s important to put your content somewhere where people can see it, like on the front page of your website.
Links in Un-Parseable Javascript
Links built using Javascript may be uncrawlable or devalued in weight by search engines. For this reason, it is recommended to use standard HTML links instead of Javascript based links on any page where search engine referred traffic is important.
Links in Flash, Java, or Other Plug-Ins
Search engines cannot read the text that is embedded in Flash, Java applets, and other plug-ins.
Links Pointing to Pages Blocked by the Meta Robots Tag or Robots.txt
The Meta Robots tag and the robots.txt file are both ways for a website owner to restrict spider access to a page.
Links on pages with Hundreds or Thousands of Links
The search engines will only spider a limited number of links on each page- about 150. If you have more than that, they may stop looking at other pages on your website.
This limit is somewhat flexible, and particularly important pages may have upwards of 200 or even 250 links followed. But in general, it’s a good idea to limit the number of links on any given page to 150 or less so that the page can be crawled more easily.
Links in Frames or I-Frames
Frames and I-Frames technically can be crawled by search engines, but using them can create problems for the engines. They have trouble understanding the structure of a site when frames are used, and this can lead to lower rankings for your pages. Only advanced users who understand how search engines index and follow links should use frames on their sites.
If you want to make sure that your website’s links are easy for spiders to crawl, avoid these mistakes. Make sure that your links are clean and have no errors. You can also add additional attributes to your links, but the engines mostly ignore them. However, there is one exception – the rel=”nofollow” tag.
Do you want to know how many pages of your website Google has indexed? Use a tool like Moz Pro, Link Explorer, or Screaming Frog to crawl your website. Compare the number of pages the crawl found to the number of pages shown in Google’s site: search results.
Rel=”nofollow” can be used with the following syntax:
<pre><a href=”/” rel=”nofollow”>nofollow this link</a></pre>
Adding the rel=”nofollow” attribute to a link tag tells the search engines that you do not want this link to be interpreted as a normal vote.
What is internal linking vs external linking?
Internal linking is when a website links to other pages on the same website. External linking is when a website links to pages on different websites.
Why are internal links important?
Internal links are important because they help Google understand and rank your website better. By giving Google links to follow along with descriptive anchor text, you can indicate to Google which pages of your site are important, as well as what they are about. Internal links can also help improve user experience and engagement.
How many internal links are too many?
Google has said that they can crawl 100s of links per page, but there is no definite answer as to how many links are too many. Practically speaking, having lots of links on a page can be bad for user experience. Limiting the number of links to a reasonable number (typically around 100 or less) can provide additional SEO benefits.
How do you find internal linking opportunities?
One way to find good internal linking opportunities is to find pages on your site that rank for related topics. Make sure these pages link to each other with descriptive anchor text.
