One of the relatively “single” methods of good rankings is: internal links. An internal link is simply a link that connects two pages of your website. A well-implemented internal-linking strategy can be a gold mine when it's going to optimize your content for the first page of Google, but on the way there are several pitfalls. In this article we go through 5 of the most common errors that occur when it comes to internal relinking.
Not actively using internal links
Not actively using internal links is the biggest error you can make. All pages with more than one page will, naturally, have a set of internal links. For example, from the front page that links to the category pages and category pages that links to the sub-categories. For most people, this is clearly necessary for users to navigate from one location to another.
Internal links not only play an important role in navigation and user experience for your users, but are also an important factor in ranking high with your Google content.
Internal links help Google:
- Discover content faster
- Understand the importance of the various pages on your website in relation to each other.
- Understand what the content is about and what keywords it should rank below
Not focusing on the use of internal links across the page, whether categories or subcategories or articles, is therefore a bad idea that can cost you both traffic and the ratings you dream about in your search engines.
Not to focus on relevance
Although there should now be no doubt whether you should be investing in developing internal links on your website, it is not free to do so when it comes to: how you choose to build links internally. It may be tempting to select strong pages and link them up to other pages on your website on a large scale. Many people are tempted and therefore a common error is assumed to be “an internal link”. However, internal links may differ greatly when it comes to the value of your website. The value of an internal link depends, inter alia, on the contextual relevance between the pages it links to each other.
As mentioned above, one of the important functions of internal links is to help Google understand what the content is about and what the keywords the content should rank below. A prerequisite for providing Google with information about this is, of course, that internal links are relevant to each other.
Linking a blog post on email marketing to a recipe on chocolate cake has no intention. With this in mind, it becomes quite clear that interlocking in cabins and torments is not a useful strategy.
Patrik Dholakiya has created a checklist to see whether a page is experienced as relevant enough to be linked from another. Make sure that the following points are met:
- The page deals with a theme that is related to the content you want to link it to
- The link causes the browser to experience increased value by clicking on it
- The link contributes to increased page quality
- Back-connections to the page/item are relevant
- It is logical to relate the content to the keyword you want to rank below
If the page or content you want to internal link does not meet the above requirements, it is not relevant enough to link together.
Using the wrong anchor text
The anchor text is the text that belongs to the link and has the task of describing the destination link.
A mistake made by many is not to use the anchor to do just that – describe the destination. A number of websites fill the anchor text with words such as “here”, “read more” and similar. This instead of filling it with the appropriate contents. Words like “here” have no meaning in isolation and only see the anchor text it has no information value related to what you can expect by clicking on it.
In the example below, it is clearly emerging for both the reader and Google that by clicking on the link, you end up on a guide for beginners in Google Ads. If we had chosen to put the link in “Read this” we would have lost the value of the anchor text.
A golden rule for developing anchor text should be that it describes both the content of which it is obtained by clicking on it, while at the same time the main keyword of which it wishes to rank below. The text may be directly compatible with the search phrase or phrase you want to rank below, or with a variation of it.
Creating internal competition
It is easy to get overly overly concerned in developing internal links and losing the overall picture. It is, however, essential to be able to see all internal links and anchored texts in full and in relation to each other. It's only with the overall picture that we can avoid creating internal competition.
If you link to four different pages, but use the same anchor for all four, then it is not possible for Google to understand which of these pages it will rank under the search phrase or phrase in the anchor.
If you find that the same content is deserved to the same anchor text, take a step back and see if the content of the different pages should have been collected on one page or whether you have done a good enough job of setting clear and separate keywords for each of the pages.
Similarly, as it has no value to use the same anchor text for different links, it also has no intention to link to the same content from one side, with different anchor texts:
This may seem like a trick to give Google more information about what your content is about, as well as building more relevant links, but the truth is that there is only the first link as “count” and other links are considered black holes in an applicant-optimisation perspective. In the case above, only the anchor text “herresko” will count.
Using nofollow links internally
A nofollow link, illustrated by rel=nofolow, is a link that does not boost a pages PageRank or affect positions in the search result. Using a nofollow roof is simply the same as telling the search engines that they should not count with the link.
Nofollow has its value in paid links, comment fields, forums and other “uncertain” content. Using nofollow however, has little value when it comes to internal networking. All internal links should be so-called follow-links. A nofollow link internally symbolises Google and other search engines that you don't trust your own content.
Google Software Engineer, Matt Cutts, has stated that the use of nofollow links internally to “useless” pages is not directly harmful. He further says that in these cases it might be useful to use noindex so that the pages are not indexed.
The main point is that nofollow links rarely are a good idea when it comes to internal links and that in most cases it is more useful to let Googlebot index freely on your page. All internal links should be follow-links. If you meet the need to use nofollow on an internal link, you should consider whether the page is worth linking. You should also ask questions about whether it should be indexed by Google at all.
If you want help with internal links, you may want to talk with a SEO AgencySo let's say that this is the same thing as that.