Interlinking Pages: The More Links the Merrier?

[robzilla]

On one of my sites, in an effort to help visitors find more of my pages, increase pageviews and spread link juice among pages, I'm considering turning all keywords in text that have relevant pages on the site into links. Say my site is about widgets, and has a [big widgets] page, I would turn every occurrence of "big widgets" (and similar terms such as "large widgets") on all other pages of the site into a link to the [big widgets] page. It's similar to what Wikipedia is doing, but they do this only once per keyword, per page.

I'm wondering if there might be any downsides to turning every relevant occurrence of a keyword/keyphrase into a link on a particular page, even if it occurs, say, 6 times (often with varying anchor text, e.g. "big widgets", "large widgets", "sizable widgets" etc). In other words, can it be overdone?

I would love to hear some opinions on this, and perhaps also of experiences you may have had with interlinking.

[econman]

I would turn every occurrence of "big widgets" (and similar terms such as "large widgets") on all other pages of the site into a link to the [big widgets] page.

This strikes me as too much of a good thing. It doesn't seem like it would be very user-friendly, and it would definitely make your site have a very unusual link pattern. Whether that would hurt you, I can't say, but you might be wandering off into risky territory vis a vis the patterns that the search engines study.

[jbinbpt]

I would stay far away from this. From a users perspective this would drive me nuts. I would think multiple links to pages in the same domain would dilute rather than raise your PR.

[robzilla]

Funny how one can sometimes lose touch with reality (or common sense) and be blinded by one's own (the webmaster's) advantages. Although those advantages may also be questioned. So thanks for getting me back.

I suppose that, from a user perspective, it might even be worse than making every occurrence of the keywords bold, which I personally find very annoying when reading a page. Also, I (now) think that my website probably just doesn't lend itself to the kind of interlinking that Wikipedia is using in its articles (which I personally find unobtrusive and helpful).

I still feel that interlinking is quite important, but I need to find more realistic (and user-friendly) ways of doing this.

[ogletree]

Interlinking your site is a very important part of seo. What you are saying is a very good idea. One thing you need to consider is to split your site up into sections and only have pages link to other pages in its own section. This is called siloing. Anybody who says interlinking is dumb has never been to wikipedia. They are the king of doing this.

[tigger]

I agree with ogletree its a good idea and I've been doing it a lot recently on a couple of new projects and its working well, as for messing with the surfers head I just don't see that, if its point the surfer onto what he wants to read about then great

[glengara]

The pros/cons of interlinking depend entirely on how it's implemented and what the perceived intent is, and the intent behind the OPs' initial suggestion is way too transparent, IMO....

[ogletree]

If you want to learn about interlinking look at wikipedia and about.com. They are very good at it. Google is not going to come slap you because of the way you link your pages.

[Matt Probert]

Our site was perhaps the first site to carry full interlinking - Wikipedia copied many of our concepts as well as data - it has never done us any harm in search engines, and of course is a benefit to uers who can easily find related data.

Matt

[angiolo]

> This is called siloing

Could you explain better the concept?
It's the first time I heard this name ( siloing )

Thank you

[glengara]

I remember a major publisher used to be held up as the example for interlinking domains, for many minor players the results of copying their methods were..........disappointing.

[ogletree]

Siloing is where you split your site up into categories or silos. This is done by linking. Pages in one silo can only link to stuff in the same silo. This keeps all your links on topic. You can still link between silos if you want just don't do it without a reason or you can use nofollow on links that cross silo. There is a whole debate on whether it is a good idea to use nofollow inside your own site. I don't really have an opinion on this yet. I'm starting to see it all over the place now. As long as G does not start to penalize this I think it is a good idea. I am seeing a lot of big sites starting to use this method to funnel links on a site.

[pgmason]

Perhaps doing it with every occurrence of the phrase is too much - how about doing it with the first occurence on any given page? That would seem to have something of a user benefit as well as possibly benefitting your SEO - you've got your keyword rich link text, and if an unfamiliar user enters the site through that page, they can go directly ot the section they want.

Pete