Too Much Internal Linking

Thanks for any help

[Jameson]

My site has 200 pages. Each and every page has a header and a side menu with links to 15 different areas on my site. Will google penalize me for having links to these 15 areas on every single page of my site? My index page is the only page without the 15 links..

[SmallTime]

Not to worry. And welcome to Webmasterworld.

[Dante_Maure]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com] Jameson. :)

[soapystar]

im constantly seeing travel sites where the entire index of 100s of hotels appears on every page..and they seem to get good ranking for each page due to the many back links now showing....so..seems internal links count by sheer numbers rather than good structure!

[HarryM]

I was just wondering about this question myself having just completed a check on my internal links. Since the last Google update my site (non-commercial) has grown from about 40 pages to 136 pages and now has 2300 internal links. So am waiting to see what Google makes of it... :)

Essentialy on each page there is a navbar to all areas in the site, plus links back to the main index page and any local index pages, plus a mini index of the local page cluster. There is also a site map.

[Jameson]

Thanks for the relieve. I appreciate it..

[dcheney]

My largish (20k pages) non-commercial site is highly interlinked. Even the smallest pages typically have at least 40 internal links - larger ones often have 100's.

Doesn't appear to have had any negative impact. (Currently PR6).

[HarryM]

Any known problems with duplicate internal linkings? For example where links on a page are duplicated by a standard navbar?

[Yidaki]

I would say: don't worry about internal linking at all!

More: you can do a lot of good to your site if you link internaly following theme structures.

Allway worth to read this related stuff:
Theme Pyramids [searchengineworld.com]
Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone [webmasterworld.com]

[HarryM]

Thanks Yidaki,

I'm not worried about internal linking, just being cautious.

Last month I changed and increased my internal linking structure and it raised the PR throughout the site. So its entirely possible that some change I might make could inadvertently destroy all that. If duplicate linkings are a potential problem then I would eliminate them.

Harry

[Yidaki]

If the linked site itself isn't a duplicate, there should be no problem. Raising PR throughout your site via internal linking is one of the clues of the mentioned threads (Themes, Pyramids ...)

[dcheney]

You may also want to consider it from a users perspective. Generally I figure if a user comes to the front door of my web site and knows what he wants to find out - then it shouldn't take him more than about 5 clicks to get to that information. (Granted this is probably only an issue for largish sites - mine is about 20k pages so its an issue.)