Help with Internal linking SEO best practices

[shaunm]

Hi,

What's considered to be the SEO best practice in the following situations?

1. When multiple anchor texts are used to link to the same page on a page only the first anchor texts counts.

So, from the page example.com, I am linking to a page at two instances with two different anchor texts

'Mobile Applications' example.com/product.aspx - This will count.
'Free Mobile Applications' example.com/product.aspx - This will not count.

But if I choose the other way

'Mobile Applications' example.com/product.aspx - This will count.
'Free Mobile Applications' example.com/product.aspx#Free_Mobile_Applications - This will also count.

Is this a legitimate way? It looks like most people have already started doing doing this. Can I be possibly penalized in the future when Google rethinks about it?

2. I see that almost all the references suggest to limit the no of links going out from a page to 100 and only to link to the most important pages. If it can help the user to interact more with your site, then you can place more links to the reference docs from the side-links such as that. But still it dilutes PR.

I ran an URL through all the internal linking analysis tool online, all the tools report repeated links as separate links and separate link juice flow to them. Is that how search engines treats as well?

When the page example.com links to example.com/product.aspx in five places. Are all these five links going to get their share of link juice from the linked page?

3. Of late, rel=nofollow becomes of no use since Google doesn't attribute any credits to the links used within the rel=nofollow tag. At the same time it's believed that a share of link juice is still wasted.

It looks like we should avoid using rel=nofollow within interlining of a site (which Matt suggests)

But what about external links and those internal links which don't have any value but you cannot refrain from using it on your most authority pages?

We use a lot of third party services which requires a link to be placed for the external docs/videos to be loaded on our pages from the CDN networks as well as internal links pointing at the resources sections of the site to help the visitors.

In that case, stopping the link juice flowing to them is not possible with rel=nofollow. Then how would I restrict it?


Thanks for all your help!

[aakk9999]

1. The test about URL fragment carrying through anchor text has been done quite some time ago so it may or may not work any more. Yes, there are websites doing this, some for manipulative and some for legitimate reasons (e.g. sending the visitor to a particular part of the target page).

Nobody knows what Google will do in the future but for many things they did change how they treat things if it gets abused. Or they may just change how they treat it and ignore it.

2. Limiting links to 100 was Google recommendation from many years ago. I don't think this is valid any more. But if you do have so many links on the page, you may want to re-think your site architecture.

Also there is a difference where every page would have 100+ links because they are in the main nav, side nav and footer, and where the actual navigation would be much slimmer, but where some pages would have 100+ links because of the nature of the page. I think the second case would be ok whereas the first case probably needs re-thought site architecture.

3.

Of late, rel=nofollow becomes of no use

This is not "of late", it is a very old news. Google announced it back in 2009 and said the change was in fact done a year before they announced it [mattcutts.com...]

There are the ways of "hiding" the links from Googlebot, but you have to decide yourself if this is wise or not and what would happen if your site gets a manual review. One way is to use external javascript to create the link and block this javascript from being crawled by Google. But there is no guarantee what would happen if your site then gets a manual review.

[edited by: aakk9999 at 5:51 pm (utc) on May 21, 2014]

[lucy24]

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When multiple anchor texts are used to link to the same page on a page only the first anchor texts counts.

First? You mean sequentially first, in the order the googlebot reads the page? Or physically closest to the top, where a human will see it first? Is this something that's known objectively?

almost all the references suggest to limit the no of links going out from a page to 100 and only to link to the most important pages

Well, that's more a recommendation than a rule, isn't it? If you have zillions of links, the search engine might think it's a directory page and ignore the whole thing. Or, if they're site-internal links, maybe it's a sitemap by another name.

Modest personal example: When I moved sites near the end of last year, I couldn't understand why the search engines were so fascinated by volume 6b of a particular ebook series. Nobody ever goes there directly; it's the general index to the series. Finally I figured out that that's just the point: The search engine doesn't know from General Index. It only knows that this page contains 19,000 links. (You'd think it would eventually figure out that all those links are pointing to a total of six other pages in the same subdirectory-- but I guess "nineteen thousand links" trumps all other considerations.)

those internal links which don't have any value

If they don't have any value, why are they there? Internal links are for the benefit of the user. It would be weird if a site didn't link copiously to itself.

[shaunm]

Thanks @aakk9999 & lucy24 :-)

Also there is a difference where every page would have 100+ links because they are in the main nav, side nav and footer, and where the actual navigation would be much slimmer, but where some pages would have 100+ links because of the nature of the page.

Isn't it a general practice where each and every page will have the main nav, side nav and footer links? Does a link from the above will be treated and get credited the same way like a link in the visible content section of the page?

I am curious we cannot get rid of these sections because these helps the visitors to navigate to the international version of the site, resources. I'm concerned about the Search engine perspective. Do they give ANY VALUE to the links used in the default main nav, side links, footers at all?

Because of these default links almost all the pages in the website, both priority and non priority pages, have 300+(40% duplicates) links.

Again, are repeated links on a page counted as separate links?

First? You mean sequentially first, in the order the googlebot reads the page? Or physically closest to the top, where a human will see it first? Is this something that's known objectively?

Sequentially first?! [moz.com...]

I'm a bit confused because moz posts points out links used in the main nav and in the content where the nav link will be counted since it's the first one and the content link will be ignored because it's the second one.

Isn't the content most prominent place to link to the relevant section of your website where you can use the main keywords in the anchor(variation) for the linked page to get some credit/signal which can help its ranking? Does that makes contextual linking of no use if the link is already present in your nav?

If they don't have any value, why are they there? Internal links are for the benefit of the user. It would be weird if a site didn't link copiously to itself.

May be they are dangling links which can help the user likes docs, videos? There's no reason for these pages to get a share of link juice from my homepage where I cannot refrain from using them because it improves user engagement?

Thanks again for all your help!