When it comes to link-building approaches, one of the things we notice about marketers is getting hyperfocused on external and backlinks, ignoring internal linking altogether.
While it’s true that employing high-quality and authoritative links is one of the most valuable link-building strategies, it’s not everything.
If you want your website to succeed, you want eggs in every basket and maximize the strategies available to you, including internal linking.
Of course, if you’re new to this optimization strategy, it’s natural to make mistakes as you implement it across your web pages. Unfortunately, typical errors in linking, like orphan pages and broken links, can compromise your SEO efforts and hurt your website’s user experience.
So, to help keep you on track, we’ve compiled five of the most common internal linking mistakes, how to fix them, and some tried-and-tested tips to keep your rankings on top in 2024.
Table of Contents
What Is Internal Linking?
Internal linking is placing hyperlinks on anchor texts that point users and search engine bots to different pages on the same website.
Unlike external links, which lead your audience “outside,” internal links allow users to navigate your website’s content.
Why Is It Important For Websites?
Internal links are essential for your link-building efforts for three main reasons.
First, they assist search engines in understanding your website’s internal linking structure. You can think of them as road signs, pointing Google to the right places on your website, and showcasing your domain’s organization.
Internal linking errors, however, can confuse search engine bots and crawlers. They make figuring out how different web pages relate to one another or understanding their contexts difficult, affecting how well Google crawls and indexes pages on your site.
Second, and many marketers are unaware of this, is how internal links help improve your website’s authority by passing one page’s importance (PageRank) to another.
In short, if you have a page with considerable backlinks and a higher page rank, linking your other pages in the content will pass its authority to the linked pages. We call this SEO strategy passing link equity or link juice.
Identifying and utilizing important pages for internal linking can boost your domain’s SEO.
As Google noted in their search guide:
“Some pages are known because Google has already crawled them before. Other pages are discovered when Google follows a link from a known page to a new page.”
Third, and most importantly, internal links boost your user’s experience while using your website. You can, for example, connect one page about “health benefits of cucumber” to another about “how to make cucumber juice.”
By providing useful and relevant content like these, you can help your users and increase your site’s traffic—two birds with one stone.
5 Internal Linking Mistakes and How to Fix Them
Now that you understand why internal links matter, here are five of the most common mistakes in your internal linking strategy and how to fix them:
1. Using Dead or Broken Internal Links
Dead or broken links are a notorious blunder when building internal links. They redirect users to pages that can’t be found, don’t exist, or are already deleted from your website.
This issue can also happen through technical errors, such as mistyping the URL, improper link formatting, or when updating the linked page.
When the user clicks on these links, a pop-up message will come out saying, “404 page not found” or a domain’s custom page, “Sorry, we couldn’t find the page you’re looking for.”
While that may sound like a minimal problem, these links can impact your website’s flow of link equity, lower your credibility, and hurt your SEO performance. Not to mention its effects on the users.
Implementing link audits is the best way to fix these broken hyperlinks.
Luckily, you won’t have to manually click through each link in your webpage to check if they’re live. You can use link auditing tools from trusted SEO platforms, like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz, to search for broken links and update them.
Here’s a pro tip:
If you’re working with a tight budget, you can use Google Analytics to find and fix dead links on your site without spending anything.
2. Unintentional Noindex or Nofollow Attributes
A nofollow attribute (rel="nofollow") is a valuable tool that tells search engines not to pass link juice or equity in one particular link. You can use this handy attribute if you’re linking to outbound sites you don’t want to endorse from yours.
But that’s also why you don’t want Noindex attributes in your internal links.
Attaching a nofollow to your links nullifies the point of internal linking. That is, to distribute link equity within your site through “dofollow” attributes.
To eliminate these nofollow links, right-click anywhere on the page and select ““View page source” from the option. Then press Ctrl + F to search for “no-follow to identify these problematic internal links.
Here’s a pro tip:
If you prefer to prevent indexing or crawling on one of your pages, use robot meta tags or add an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header instead of a Noindex attribute.
3. Employing Unsuitable Anchor Texts
One seemingly harmless mistake you can make when building internal links is using unsuitable anchor texts for your hyperlinks.
From irrelevant texts and extremely long anchors to linking generic phrases, there are plenty of mistakes you want to avoid.
Spammy tactics like keyword stuffing in your anchor texts, which force keywords into your content, may discourage readers from interacting with your page’s links.
The sweet spot is using anchor texts that are descriptive or relevant to the destination page.
Appropriate text anchoring helps your users navigate more efficiently and will make your web page more intuitive. It gives the audience an idea of the link’s content they’re clicking.
For example, if you’re linking to another page about “types of SEO services,” you can find related words and phrases, such as “SEO services” or “ search engine optimization services” as anchors.
Remember:
Proper anchoring is crucial because Google uses anchor texts as a ranking signal. You don’t want generic anchors like “click here,” “read more,” or “visit page.”
4. Long Redirect Chains or Linking Loops
A redirect chain happens when there are many unnecessary redirects between the starting link and the destination page. Often, it redirects the users to a completely irrelevant page from the one they’re trying to get to.
Setting up redirect loops can be useful. However, when implemented incorrectly, it can negatively affect your SERP spot.
One consequence redirect chains can have is the loss of link juice. Direct backlinks give out 100% of the juice, one redirect can reduce it to 85%, while two reduce it further to 72%.
The more redirects, the less equity your page receives.
Another crucial con to long redirect chains is slowed site performance, which is now a factor for SEO performance. The longer the chain, the more time the browser loads through every link, affecting user experience.
You can manually go through every page and link on your website to remove redirect loops. However, it takes considerable time, especially for larger sites with many pages.
We recommend using redirect checker tools to identify problematic links that cause a loop for an easier fix.
Once located, removing them is straightforward. You need only change the redirect link of the first landing page with the final destination page’s link.
5. Overcrowding Your Page With Internal Links
Overcrowding a page with internal links is a pitfall you want to avoid. It includes links in your written content, header tags, and footers.
You want to allocate link equity as much as possible, but you don’t want your pages to appear spammy and disorganized, which can significantly disrupt user experience.
Effective internal linking helps search engines understand your website structure, like signposts. However, too many of these signposts can complicate the crawling and indexing of your pages.
Simply put, your page is less likely to appear in search results and reduce your website’s organic traffic. Besides, it also lessens your page views, as the links make them more likely to jump pages quickly!
Conversely, a small number of internal links can pose similar issues. Without much to work on, search engines may find ranking your content difficult, lowering your SERP rank.
But how much is too much or too little?
Well, there aren’t any hard limits when internal linking. But to be on the safe side, most SEO experts recommended keeping it around 100 links to maximize your internal linking strategies.
The best practices keep the user’s experience in mind, prioritizing relevant links to help your audience and organically improve your SEO results.
Final Thoughts
While many factors contribute to a website’s SEO success, internal link building is one you don’t want to approach lightly.
Internal links establish your website’s information hierarchy, spreading link equity within your pages. Most importantly, it helps users navigate your website, keeping them engaged with useful resources and improving your website’s metrics.
