One of the most crucial parts of SEO is internal linking. When done correctly, it may help you enhance your site’s search engine ranks, generate traffic, and keep people on your site for longer. When done poorly, though, it might have the opposite impact. In this blog article, we’ll go over the five most common mistakes people make when it comes to internal linking and how to avoid them.
What is Internal Linking?
Internal linking refers to links that are placed between pages on your website. It is also known as internal navigation. For example, if you have a product page selling a bike, you would want to link to the various pages related to the bike, such as the page describing the bike’s features, the page with customer reviews, etc.
5 Common Mistakes to Avoid When Using Internal Links
1. Add Way Too Many Internal Links
Don’t create plenty of internal links from a single page just because it has a high Domain Authority.
When you have a post that has received a lot of external links, it’s tempting to stuff it with as many internal links as you can. However, forcing links into a post is bad practice because it dilutes the strength of each link, and a lack of relevancy won’t help either.
Instead of over-linking, simply create useful, natural links and don’t go overboard.
2. Use the Exact Same Anchor Text Over and Over
Anchor text is the text that appears when you click on a link. It’s essential to diversify your anchor text for each link that you build.
For example, if your company name or brand is the anchor text for one of your links, it’s not good to use it again as the anchor text for a different link. Google may view this as duplicate content and judge that negatively.
A better strategy would be to use a brand name or keyword as the anchor text for some of your links, while using your company name as the anchor text for other links.
3. Not Using Enough Links
Just as having too many links might hurt your website, not having enough links means you’re passing up crucial possibilities for your website. Try designing the layout of your internal links if you want to increase your crawl budget. It may lead Google to the most critical pages on your website and ensure that each page is viewable by both Googlebot and your visitors.
4. Allowing Orphan Pages
Pages that have been posted but have no links linking to them are termed orphaned. Orphaned pages are difficult for search engines to locate, which is why they cannot be crawled. Each page you publish must have links going to it.
There are already orphaned pages that need to be changed in certain circumstances. Orphan pages are older goods, blogs, service sites, and tag pages that do not have any existing content.
5. Not Looking Out For Broken Links
Broken links may be hazardous to your website if they are not fixed and can cause your website to seem low quality or disrupt the flow of link equity through each page of your website. These occur for a variety of causes. For example, a deleted blog or page that has left links with no destination, a mistyped URL, or a change of URL address without adequate redirects. It can also degrade the user experience, resulting in a worse ranking in SERPs.
Conclusion
Internal linking is crucial to your SEO. When done correctly, it can help improve your website’s search engine rankings and increase traffic and keep visitors on your website longer. However, when done incorrectly, it can actually have the opposite effect.
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