The most common SEO waste: Poorly thought-out internal links

How your site is structured and organized will determine how successful you are with your SEO. Unfortunately, many miss the basic understanding and therefore waste a lot of their SEO efforts. Learn to take advantage of the authority and strength you have on your site to get maximum value. Here’s how you should think.

Every page on the internet that is indexed by Google has a value in the eyes of the search engine. Note, page, not site. The page can then pass on some of that value through links to other pages, and that’s how those pages gain their value. This is the very foundation of Google’s algorithm. The quick thinker might immediately jump on the idea of a page with a lot of links, distributing lots of strength, but that’s not how it works. The page can only distribute the strength it has onto the links it has out.

There are other link factors that come into play

The strength that can be distributed through links is not the only factor, and all factors need to be considered together. Here are some examples of other positive factors I always take into account when looking at outbound links (either to another page on the site or to a page on another site):

• Are the linked pages relevant?
• Does the link place the page in a context?
• Does the page draw support from the linked page, in the form of a source citation?
• Is the linked page something that can increase trust?
• Is the linked page in the right language?
• Where is the link placed?
• Is it a natural link?
• Is the linked page an authority?

For today’s thoughts, we can assume these are equal in all examples. It’s rarely the case, but we need to talk about strength in its pure form.

Classic misunderstandings

There are SEO consultants who will tell you to keep your site’s structure as flat as possible. The fewer clicks it takes to reach a page on the site, the better. This often results in navigations with hundreds of links pointing from every page to hundreds of other pages. The idea behind this is that it should be easy for Google to index the site, and that strength should flow between all the pages effortlessly. This idea is incorrect.

The background to this is that there’s an issue with Google’s Crawl Budget. Google assigns each site a certain amount of crawl time, based on several factors, including how important, how up-to-date, and how fast the site is. If you don’t have a high crawl budget and a fairly large site, Google tends to only index the pages that are most linked to. Then, it’s easy to think that we should place all the pages in the navigation.

Another reason some end up in this situation is that pages linked to from many pages on the site or from the homepage tend to rank higher. If you add the page about nuts to the navigation, it will climb a bit compared to if you have to go through one or two category pages to find it. The reason is that you’re distributing more of the site’s power to that page, and that’s precisely the problem as well.

To make this clear, we created a simple and extreme example back in 2012. The site in the graph above is a blog that initially had a completely normal navigation, with normal categories, and so on. In June 2012, we completely removed almost all navigation. Instead of a menu, categories, and so on, you could only navigate the site by clicking next or back to the homepage—there was no other form of navigation. Two links on each article: one to the next article and one back to the homepage. This almost immediately resulted in an increase in the number of indexed pages. Even though the navigation was more or less removed, the number of indexed pages increased.

What about the positions then?

Removing the navigation didn’t result in lower positions either, and the reason is the “tax” Google places on links— you get “diminishing returns” even on internal links. Over many years, on a variety of sites, we’ve removed large parts of the navigation and, in doing so, created a deeper site. This way, we increase the relevance of the links that actually exist. Instead of all pages on the site linking to the best football goals, the football section links there. We also don’t waste the authority that has been built up; instead, we direct it where it’s needed.

Weigh every link carefully

You have a set amount of power going into your site, make sure it flows to the pages that need it, not randomly, but according to your plan. Every page in the navigation will gain strength, but at the expense of all other pages, both within and outside the navigation. A link on a single page to a relevant article or product, preferably in text as a reference, is something entirely different. That’s the right way to use internal links.

It’s a relatively straightforward strategy: remove all internal links that aren’t necessary. Be as strict about which links you keep as if it were a site stuck in Penguin. Let the homepage link only to the main categories, and let the categories link to their products or articles. If there are too many articles, consider subcategories. Use tags, but watch out for tag clouds, and throw all sitewide links in the trash where they belong.