Internal linking is one of the most underutilized arrows in a site owner’s quiver.
Inbound link building gets a lot of attention, but if done strategically, internal linking can really drive your site algorithmically when used correctly.
Google has been vocal about the importance of internal linking for years.
Google's John Mueller specifically touched on this point during the 2022 Office Hours Hangout, calling internal linking “critical to SEO success.”
As a site auditor who regularly audits multiple sites daily and hundreds of sites per year, I know firsthand how important internal linking is to site recovery and improvement.
In my experience, fixing these specific internal linking mistakes strengthens your site, makes it easier for Google to index it, and improves your rankings.
How many of these mistakes are you making?
Mistake #1: Non-descriptive anchor text
One of the simplest things to understand about internal linking is that you link by the content you want to rank for.
If you want to rank for “banana cream pie,” you could use that anchor text, or a similar variation of this one:
- “Banana cream pie recipe”
- “Easy Banana Cream Pie”
- “Banana cream pie with instant pudding”
- “Old-fashioned banana cream pie”
- “No-bake banana cream pie”
- How to make banana cream pie
But typically, link scanning on client sites can produce a lot of nondescript anchor text, such as:
- “click here”
- “Look at this”
- “here”
- “Get this recipe”
- My pie recipe
- “This link”
Whenever possible, make your internal links descriptive – use anchor text that tells users and Google exactly what you're trying to index and rank for.
This is not only good SEO, but also sound accessibility practice.
There’s nothing more frustrating for a screen reader user than encountering non-descriptive anchor text that doesn’t tell the user where clicking through will send them.
Mistake #2: Cannibalizing anchor text
We know that clear, descriptive anchor text is important to both users and Google, but what happens if you use the same anchor text across multiple posts or pages?
Let’s say you have four different chocolate chip cookie recipes and you use the anchor text “chocolate chip cookies” for all of them.
Congratulations! You’ve basically guaranteed that none of these keywords will rank competitively for “chocolate chip cookies,” and you probably won’t rank at all.
This is where the concept of internal link cannibalization comes into play.
Google periodically limits a site's ranking results for certain queries, and this search diversity limit prevents certain sites from dominating the SERPs for the same target queries.
However, this isn't difficult to fix.
Sticking with our “chocolate chip cookie” example, we'll focus on differentiating your internal links by varying the anchor text.
Perhaps one of the recipes is for oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, another is for double chocolate chip cookies, and yet another is for chocolate chip cookies with brown sugar.
By strategically mapping and differentiating your internal links and corresponding anchor text, and preventing cannibalization of shared anchor text, you can rank all of these recipes and become more competitive.
In SEO, it’s no secret that not all links are created equal.
In-content links, sidebar links, footer links, etc. all count as links, but some links are more important than others.
A good rule of thumb is that a link that gets clicked is always stronger than one that doesn't get clicked.
In most cases, footer links are rarely clicked and don’t send much traffic.
Footer links are a great place to publish links to your “About” or “Contact” pages, main category pages, links to your copyright or accessibility policies, and links to social media or location-specific information.
Unfortunately, footer spam is a recent trend, fuelled by publishers using blog support companies struggling to recover their sites from the recent onslaught of HCU, Core and Spam updates.
If you come across a footer stuffed with anchor text-rich links to posts and pages, it’s probably because publishers have been misguidedly advised that footer links are a great way to boost overall site authority.
But the truth about footer links is clear: they look spammy and never send a positive signal to Google.
Conclusion: In your footer, put only the links that you want users to see. It is unlikely to be multi-column anchor text rich text.
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Mistake #4: Linking to Unindexed Content
In the early Wild Wild West days of digital marketing, there was a concept called PageRank sculpting.
The concept involves selectively nofollowing links on a page on your site, thereby controlling the amount of link equity that passes through that page.
However, this method hasn't worked for over a decade. Instead, when Google crawls a page and notices that a link on the page is nofollow, the link is ignored for algorithmic purposes.
Think of these nofollow links as black holes on your page that suck up your link equity and PageRank and make it zero. There's no way to get it back.
Therefore, avoiding linking to noindex content on your site is important for internal link building and topic discoverability.
Otherwise, the authority of your internal links will go to waste.
Mistake #5: Not fixing 404s and 503s
There's nothing more annoying for a user than visiting a page and seeing a 404 or 503.
If a user navigates through your site and repeatedly sees 404s, you can be sure that they will never come back.
Google has long been saying that 404 Not a sign of poor qualityIf the problem is widespread and systemic, 404s can completely block the flow of PageRank and link equity through your site content.
Fixing 404s and 503s isn't hard, and our SEO guide to finding and fixing broken internal links covers the issue in detail.
If you’re a blogger, we recommend using the Broken Link Checker plugin or using tools like Semrush, Moz, Ahrefs, Clarity and many other options to crawl your site internally and fix any issues as they arise.
Mistake #6: Automating Internal Links
The use of automation in SEO has become all the rage these days.
Throw a stone and you’re sure to hit an article claiming that simply installing the right plugin or using a specific AI tool can take your SEO to incredibly high levels.
For example, for WordPress bloggers, the plugin Link Whisper is a very popular internal linking option, but you can’t use it to automate link building, otherwise you’ll end up spamming your own blog.
The paid version can be awful, both in the sheer amount of suggested link targets it gives you and in the less-than-descriptive way it alerts you to link within those targets.
In general, I am against all automatic internal linking for the following reasons:
- In the end, your anchor text becomes spam. Tools that allow you to link to every instance of a chocolate chip cookie in a post do more harm than good. I see it every day.
- The tool ignores the user. With internal linking, understanding UX is really important: link when it makes sense for the user on the page. Tools rarely understand that.
- The links may not be strategic. You know your content best, so it’s always best to decide which posts to send to your users via your tools.
Again, I’m a proponent of working smarter, not harder, but when it comes to internal linking, slow and steady is always better than automation, I guarantee it.
Mistake #7: Internal permalink redirects
It's not uncommon for sites that have been around for years to change their URL at some point.
Sometimes these changes can be as simple as slightly altering a single URL to add or remove a keyword, or they can be more in-depth changes such as removing dates from URLs or changing the permalink structure across your site.
Google has been very clear for years that you should avoid modifying your URLs, especially if you're just adding or removing keywords.
But one of the biggest reasons to avoid URL changes is that they create internal permalink redirects. These extra server hops reduce the flow of PageRank across your site, which can have a massive impact on your page speed.
For example, a link to https://example.com/2022/02/sample-url.htm will redirect to https://example.com/sample-url/, and a link from https://example.com/sample-url will redirect to https://example.com/sample-url/.
The problem with the above is that most site owners neglect to do a “search and replace” and delete all their old internal links (that contain the previous URL permutation) and replace them with new URL internal links (that do not contain the previous URL permutation).
This can result in dozens, or even hundreds, of internal redirects, significantly reducing the final quality of your site.
To fix this, you can either contact your host to have them scan your site and fix it at scale, or you can fix it yourself by installing a plugin like “Find and Replace”.
Mistake #8: Overlooking link placement
Not all links are equal.
It is generally understood that in-content links at the top of a page are the most powerful form of link for SEO purposes.
Of course, you can put links in a sidebar, footer, link list, breadcrumb trail, or image — all of these links are valuable — but in-content links placed high on the page usually perform best.
Why is this the case?
Google crawls a page from top to bottom: first the header, then the body, and then everything after that.
Google then renders the page and executes any JavaScript it finds at this point – this is also why it's important not to put a lot of JavaScript on your page as it can slow things down, especially if it's pushed out client-side.
Moreover, Google has stated as early as 2016 that in-content links within key areas of a page will always be treated as more relevant than links in headers, menus, footers, or sidebars.
For internal linking purposes, it's always a good idea to link naturally from the top of a page to the bottom, but placement is very important.
Mistake #9: Isolated content pages
Orphaned content pages are internal pages that don’t have any internal links.
Fixing orphaned content pages is typically the easiest task for site owners looking to improve their topic’s discoverability in Google and ultimately their SEO.
As a general rule, we recommend that your pages have at least 3-5 unique incoming links from related content, and often more than that.
Finding and fixing orphaned content isn’t difficult: orphaned content link reports are built into most site audit suites, including Semrush, Ahrefs, Sitebulb, and Moz.
You can also use the Link Whisper plugin mentioned earlier in this article, which has a simple feature that scans your entire site and sorts all content by the number of inbound links it has.
Finally, you can use the Yoast plugin (requires premium), the All-In-One SEO plugin, and even RankMath (requires premium), which all have built-in tools to scan and display orphaned content pages and posts.
High-quality internal links show trust in you
My late good friend Bill Slawski used to talk a lot about the reliability of links.
He strongly believed that getting internal linking right was essential for search engines to understand the relationship between links, entities, and user satisfaction.
This link credibility was necessary to help rank your site and content competitively.
With constant updates to Core, Spam, and HCU, and the rise of AI Overview, effectively ranking your site has never been more competitive than it is now.
If you’re struggling with where to focus your SEO efforts in 2024, internal linking should be a top priority, as it will help you communicate your site to Google more effectively.
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