10 Internal Linking Mistakes That Harm Your Website SEO (2023)

FAQs

10 Internal Linking Mistakes That Harm Your Website SEO? ›

Moreover, they allow search engines to find out what content on your site is related and determine its value. The more links a significant page receives, the more important it will seem to search engines. Therefore, good internal links are crucial to your SEO.

Moreover, they allow search engines to find out what content on your site is related and determine its value. The more links a significant page receives, the more important it will seem to search engines. Therefore, good internal links are crucial to your SEO.

Overlooking Orphaned Pages

There's no way a user or search bot can get to those pages, so it is the silliest internal linking mistake one can make. If you have many orphaned pages on your site, it can be harmful to your SEO efforts. So make sure to audit your site for pages with no internal links.

Why Are Internal Links Important for SEO? Internal links help Google find, index and understand all of the pages on your site. If you use them strategically, internal links can send page authority (also known as PageRank) to important pages.

every long form piece of content and all important pages should have around 3-4 internal links pointing out to other pages, with an additional link per 300 words or so.

There are four types of internal links you need to know of: contextual links, navigational links, footer links, and image links.

A “toxic” link is generally considered to be a link that has the potential to harm your website's ability to rank. However, not all SEOs are aligned on how to define toxic links and whether their presence actually could hurt your ability to rank.

Content can improve inbound traffic, help grow your backlinks, lead to better social media shares, and more! Thin content, low-value content, scraped/stolen content, and automatically generated content are all big SEO mistakes to avoid! These can lead to a thin content penalty from Google.

Can you have too many internal links? ›

If a page has too many links, they may not follow all of them. Search engine crawlers may follow some of the page's links while ignoring others. If search engine crawlers don't follow a link to a page, they may fail to index that page.

What's an internal link? An internal link is a link from one page to another page on the same domain. They're simply text hyperlinks from one page to another page on your website. Of course, your website navigation is an example of internal linking, but here we're talking about links on the page, in the content.

Broken links can destroy your conversion rates. Broken links indirectly harm SEO by affecting bounce rate, time on site, and how you pass link juice. Broken links may also directly harm SEO rankings by sending signals that your website is old and outdated.

Adding pages isn't a bad thing for SEO—in fact, it's a good thing in most cases, and there isn't such a thing as “too many pages.” Problems arise when you start to add pages for no other reason than to increase your rank. In those situations, you're liable to do more harm than good to your overall domain authority.

Every internal link belongs to one of the two big camps: navigational and contextual. Links within your header, footer, sidebars, breadcrumbs, and buttons are navigational—their main goal is to help website visitors move around.

Pro tip: Aim to point to at least two or three internal links to every new piece of content. These should come from an authority page plus those within the relevant topic cluster.

What is the difference between backlinks and internal links? Backlinks are links from other websites that point to your site. Internal links are links that point from one page on your site to another. Both have SEO value, but backlinks are usually harder to get and, therefore, considered more valuable.

A bad backlink is a link that comes from a not-so trusted website. Since the Penguin algorithm change in 2012, Google has been cracking down on bad links. Before Google launched the Penguin algorithm, websites were violating Google Webmaster Guidelines with black hat SEO.

Backlinks - The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

On the other end of the spectrum, links from side with low authority, or 'spammy' sites, may not help your rank. Toxic backlinks may not only harm your rank, but could also lead to penalties from search engines.

Too Many Backlinks Can Be Problematic

However, through our research, we have discovered that Google wants to see quality over quantity and if there are too many links built in an unnatural way Google will catch you and penalize your site.

What are the biggest SEO fails? ›

According to research by Search Engine journal 32.9% of SEOs cite lack or resources as the number one challenge they face.

Black hat SEO is a practice against search engine guidelines, used to get a site ranking higher in search results. These unethical tactics don't solve for the searcher and often end in a penalty from search engines. Black hat techniques include keyword stuffing, cloaking, and using private link networks.

Unethical SEO Practices

Making use of automated queries without the permission from search engines. A method of “cloaking” is used whereby content is submitted to search engines in such a way that some text is not clearly obvious or apparent to a targeted audience.

One of the most frequent SEO errors is not checking if Google indexes pages.

One of the many reasons startups fail at SEO is the use of the wrong keywords. Choosing the best keywords can be an exhausting job especially if you don't know that much about SEO or you are in a highly popular niche. Use a keyword research tool for suggestions. Be careful whether you chose short or long tail keywords.

One of the things about learning SEO that can be challenging is the amount of information you need to read and process. You need to become familiar with powerful tools like Google Analytics, SEMRush, and Moz, which involves a lot of reading and practice.

Use the internal link analyzer tool to analyze the links search engine spiders can detect on a specific page of your website. Search engines, spider links to index and determine the structure of a website and the relation between pages. The link analyzer tool checks: The Total number of links found on your page.

What are internal backlinks? ›

Internal backlinks connect one post or page to another. This can be done by linking textual or image content as the connecting source. Creating hyperlinks via words is more common than using images because it flows more naturally within the context of an article.

How Many Links Per Day Is Safe? You can safely build 1 link or even 500 links per day. There is no limit to how many links you can build so long as you follow the rules.

Less is more, especially when it comes to an effective link-building strategy. If you add multiple links within each paragraph of a blog post, you have definitely gone overboard. Try and stick to three to five inbound and outbound links per 1000 words.

The real question we should be asking ourselves at this point is “is the number of internal links per page still a relevant metric we need to worry about?” From a purely technical standpoint, according to this help article on Moz.com, search engines have approximately a crawl limit of 150 links per page.

Internal linking is when a site links to URLs located on the same domain, whereas external linking is when a site links to URLs located on other domains.

Internal links are hyperlinks on one page of your site that direct the reader to a target page on your site, whereas an external link is a hyperlink that directs the reader to a reputable page on a different website.

Very simply, internal linking occurs when a site links to other URLs on the same site, whereas external linking occurs when a site links to URLs on a different site. Put another way, internal links are when you link to your own pages, while external links point to pages on other domains.

Toxic backlinks are links that don't come from high-quality, trusted authority sites. As a result, they can and will hurt your SEO if there are enough of them, so it's essential to know how to spot them and understand what to do if you find you have them.

How much do website redesigns affect SEO? Website redesigns can have a big impact on SEO. When done well, the improved UX can boost rankings, but if the redirects aren't carefully mapped, it can lower your authority and result in your website losing a lot of organic traffic.

External linking improves your SEO.

The external links you add can assist search engines in determining the usefulness and quality of your pages. High-quality pages usually link to other high-quality pages; thus, search engines will look at your content favorably, helping you rank higher.

Which SEO should be avoided? ›

Spinning Content

Let's start out this one by saying, please don't. Content “spinning” is a straight-up bad SEO tactic. It involves copying ideas and structures from other websites, and then rewording parts of the content to avoid direct plagiarism. This can even involve using artificial intelligence to tweak content.

How many keywords are too many? The ideal keyword density preferred by both readers and search engines is around two to five percent. Even in longer pieces, the best practice is not to exceed 20 uses per webpage.

It's easier for pages to rank if they focus on one topic, so you should focus on two or three primary keywords per page that are reworded variations. Targeting four or more keywords is difficult because there is limited space in the title and meta description tags to target them.

Although link building is one of the most essential parts of off-page SEO, email marketing can help with it too. SEO helps you reach the top of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). This, in turn, can give added visibility to your brand and help establish you as an authority in the industry.

The appropriate page URL is 75 characters long. As for indexing documents with long URLs (over 75-120 characters), they are generally indexed quite well, although there may be difficulties in the ranking. Here you can check the maximum limits of URL length in different browsers.

every long form piece of content and all important pages should have around 3-4 internal links pointing out to other pages, with an additional link per 300 words or so.

No, internal links stay within your website domain, they do not come from an external source. Backlinks are external links that point to your domain.

External linking improves your SEO.

The external links you add can assist search engines in determining the usefulness and quality of your pages. High-quality pages usually link to other high-quality pages; thus, search engines will look at your content favorably, helping you rank higher.

Yes, it is harmful for the SEO. Sometimes these methods are also called as “cloaking” where webmasters show content to users which are different than the search engine bots. In your case, bots can crawl to these URLs with empty anchor texts, but users won't find it out.

Yes! Outbound links are a great way to improve your SEO and provide value to your readers. Just be sure to use them sparingly in each piece of content and choose quality over quantity.

How many internal links is too many? ›

Google's Link Limit

In the past, Google reportedly said that pages should have fewer than 100 links. It didn't force webmasters to follow this link limit. Rather, Google's guidelines stated that webmasters should use a reasonable number of links per page, with fewer than 100 links being the recommended limit.

A dofollow link is the most valuable type of link as it passes SEO value and authority to the site it leads to. Dofollow links are active hyperlinks with anchor text (the text that is hyperlinked) that is typically related to the name or topic of the campaign's content or publisher.

Does changing a URL impact SEO? Quick Answer: Yes, it does. The effect of doing so can be severe, as it makes your site more susceptible to issues like 404 errors, broken links, and lost links — all of which negatively impact your SEO.

Inbound links, also known as backlinks, occur when another website links back to your site. Google views inbound links as an indicator that your site has high-quality content, making these links one of the most important elements in search engine optimization (SEO).

Many industry experts, however, advise against linking more than once to the same page. Based on what we've found from our own research, we recommend 1-2 external links for every 500 words of content.