Can internal links be considered spam?

links, tag, spam, google

[erk01]

I manage a site that has good page rank sitewide. My trouble is getting the correct page to display in Google for a given search. Currently, if the Google search "blue widgets" is performed I get an individual "blue widget" product page in the results, not my preferred "blue widgets" product -group- page.

I'm wondering if I make all references to "blue widgets", sitewide, be links back to the "blue widgets" product group page, the one I want Google to show, would that be ok? Would Google look at it as spam? We have about 800 pages indexed by Google, I would imagine 50 relate to "blue widgets", each having probably have 5-10 "blue widgets" references in their body that we could make links.

I did a fair amount of searching before posting this Q. Most of the info pertains to getting too many inbound links, whereas I'm referring to internal links on our site.

Thanks for any advice!

[edited by: tedster at 5:28 pm (utc) on April 20, 2007]
[edit reason] fix formatting [/edit]

[tedster]

Internal links and anchor text can definitely trip various penalties, filters, etc with Google.

We have about 800 pages indexed by Google, I would imagine 50 relate to "blue widgets", each having probably have 5-10 "blue widgets" references in their body that we could make links.

Sounds like too much to me. Yes, your internal link structure and anchor text will tell Google which pages you consider to be important for a given topic, but take it easy and make it natural. Linking every occurence of the phrase will most likely cause troubles.

I think of anchor text like Google ticklish region. A light touch and you can get them to laugh. But a heavy touch will just piss them off.

[erk01]

Thanks for the reply.

I'll probably just add a few links where appropriate, and see how it goes. Would you say a total of ~15 links would be reasonable? Also, does the tag the link is within matter, e.g., a <h2> link?

[WW_Watcher]

Just an example for arguments sake, take a look at Wiki, where you will find every mention of any paticular widgit, linked to the corresponding widgit page. And we all know just how Wiki is doing these days with G.

Back to Watching(I gotta post every now and then),
WW_Watcher

Edited to correct my spelling of widget from wiget

[edited by: WW_Watcher at 7:53 pm (utc) on April 20, 2007]

[bouncybunny]

Although Wiki's link structure points to different pages with each keyword, rather than one keyword pointing to the same page, repeated ten times.

I often finish an article on my sites with a list of up to 10 links to other relevent topics on the site. Seems natural and useful to my visitors, but I do sometimes worry that I am overdoing it. I notice that WW only has two 'similar links' at the bottom of each thread.

[londrum]

the good way of doing it, which might not be suitable for you because it might require renaming a lot of pages (although you could always redirect the old URLS) is to make the main product page the index.html page of a directory.

for example... if you are selling blue widgets, then have a directory that is actually called 'blue-widgets', and make the index.html of that directory the main page that you want to come up for that search term.

and then point the other pages to it by using

http://www.example.com/blue-widgets/

[edited by: tedster at 9:38 pm (utc) on April 20, 2007]
[edit reason] switched to example.com - it will never be owned [/edit]

[erk01]

Londrum, thanks for the reply. I think I already do something like you recommend, although I don't use the index.html file.

My main blue widgets page is:
www.example.com/products/blue-widgets/

My product pages are:
www.example.com/products/blue-widgets/widget1/
www.example.com/products/blue-widgets/widget2/
www.example.com/products/blue-widgets/widget3/
etc...

The problem I'm having is that www.example.com/products/blue-widgets/widget1/ is appearing higher in the results than www.example.com/products/blue-widgets/

I just don't know if I should modify our app to replace every occurrence of “blue-widgets”, in the main article content area, to be a link back to the www.example.com/products/blue-widgets/ page; very much like wiki as WW_Watcher mentioned.

As –somewhat related- side note: I’m starting to learn that too much boilerplate redundancy isn’t good. I have a lot, because my menu system is a purecss menu that allows every tier to be seen by search engines. Lot’s of redundant content and essentially a sitemap worth of links on each page. It is positioned absolutely and the boilerplate/menu content starts below the unique page content, but still, I think that may be an issue?

[londrum]

yeah, it's always best to "nail down" your navigation to what is strictly necessary, and forget the rest. it's better for search engines, and its better for usability too.

each page should contain (for example)

1) a link to the homepage

2) a link to the main page of each core product (ie. one link to the blue widgets page, one link to the red widgets page, one link to green widgets and one link to yellow widgets)

and then, 3) however many links you want to whatever product you are looking at. so if they are on the blue widgets product page, then you should include links to blue widget #1, blue widget #2, blue widget #3 etc...

but there is little point in giving them links to red widget #1, red widget #2 and red widget #3 on the blue widget page, as they probably aren't even interested in buying red widgets -- just give them one link to the main red widget product page and leave it at that.
you can then use that screen real estate for something more useful, like plugging the thing they actually want -- blue widgets!

that will also massively cut down on the number of internal links to all your other pages, and hopefully solve your original problem.

[lfgoal]

" Internal links and anchor text can definitely trip various penalties, filters, etc with Google."

Could you be specific with examples of this? Wikipedia was mentioned and their use of internal linking always comes up in my mind when I consider these issues.

Take the subject of voodoo for instance. Wikipedia has a page on this subject and according to yahoo site explorer, there are 1775 links to the page. Of these links, 637 are from external sources, so about 1100 links are from other wikipedia pages.

Doesn't seem to have affected the wikipedia page on voodoo because if you search that subject in google, the wikipedia page is squarely at the top of page one.

I happen to like the wikipedia approach. It makes many of that site's pages accessible without having to run a search. And I can't tell you how many times I've gone to a page that was internally linked on a wikipedia page.

My own feeling and logic is this: why should internal linking ever trigger a penalty or filter as long as the page you're linking to is actually relevant to the anchor text?

You should be able to link to your own pages, where relevant, without this being an issue. How google ranks them should be their own concern, but for google to dole out penalties simply because they are not up to the task of handling spam, i.e. differentiating spam from real content, is illogical.

I'll repeat. Linking to your own pages when such linking is relevant, and when the anchor text used is relevant to the target page, should never be penalized because it makes no sense.

[idolw]

hehe, lfgoal, actually they often treat internals as regular links.
haven't you noticed that trusted sites rank high on internal links only for some smaller keywords?

[lfgoal]

"haven't you noticed that trusted sites rank high on internal links only for some smaller keywords? "

Could you rephrase that? Not quite sure what you meant