The Most Common Internal Link Building Mistakes
Internal Link Building is one of the most effective ways to improve your website’s search engine rankings. Its primary purpose is to increase the value of your internal pages. By enhancing the importance of these pages, you also increase their ranking power, which increases the ranking power of any page they link to.
Aligning internal links is the best way to give a boost to your revenue generation. You can solve these purposes with the right strategy to internal link building:
- Take your visitors to related internal links.
- Amplify traffic on the most relevant landing pages.
- Increase the value of high-converting pages.
On the other hand, ignoring the importance of internal links can take you down the drains by:
- Providing the worst user experience.
- Increasing the crawl budget.
- Visualizing a downfall in your website rankings.
Internal links may seem to be a small part of SEO. But, optimizing your internal links will attract more traffic along with decreasing bounce rates, increasing in pages visited per session, and the number of repeated visitors. For that, you can refer to the section mentioned below.
What is Internal Link Building?
"Internal link" SEO activity refers to linking web pages within your website or other pages. A typical example of internal link activity would be to link back to a page on your website on another page. Internal links help search engines find other pages on your website and also boost your SEO rankings.
Using multiple internal links throughout your website can help you rank for more keywords and help visitors navigate to important pages on your website. For example, if you have multiple pages about a particular topic, you can link to those pages within your website using internal linking.
Internal links help search engines find and index other pages on your website. For example, if you link from one page on your website to another page, search engines will crawl your other page and find and index the link. Internal links also help users navigate your website because users can click on a link and be taken directly to a page on your website.
Building internal links can be time-consuming and difficult, especially if your website is significant and it contains thousands of pages. Fortunately, several tools can help you build internal links."
The guide to avoiding the most common internal link building mistakes
First of all, it is necessary to govern the links you have on each web page. You can SEO Audit the status of your links with link monitoring tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and others. And figure out your broken links with tools like dead link checker and broken link checker.
After this, it will be easy to reposition and fix any internal link errors. So, these are the categories of faulty internal links:
Broken Internal Links
Broken internal links are the links that connect a web page with other pages of the same domain. Broken links affect your website's crawlability and indexability. But why? The links could be no longer in use, could have URL malformation or typographical errors.
When a web crawler lands on a blank page, it affects the flow of link equity. Well, you can have many internal links working fine. But, a single broken link can influence your link balance.
So, it becomes necessary to:
- Check for any typing mistakes in the URLs.
- Assign 404 error code to pages not relevant now and submit for its deletion to Google search console.
- Redirect 301 error code for permanently redirecting. You can use it on related relevant pages. It will help users reach the desired destination. Also, search engines rank your related relevant pages.
Furthermore, you can access SEO services for the proper allocation of internal links within site.
Broken external links
Any website can't cover all the topics of the industry. You're providing high-quality content with strong visuals and infographics, and your visitors will come to your website.
There could be many difficult words on the web page, numerical data/statistics, and research done by others. For these cases, assigning external links becomes mandatory. But, what if the external links are invalid. They won't come back out of frustration! For this:
- Look out for some redirected external links. And assign those in place of broken external links.
- If the website is not valid anymore, see if they have changed the domain name.
- The possibility is both of the above cases are not valid. In this case, look out for other suitable authority pages.
Too many links on a page
Too many links on a page are like being greedy for internal linking. It won't serve any good purpose, but it looks spammy. Using the optimal number of links is better from an SEO point of view. And it can affect your Google rankings. Can you imagine, some web designers use over 1000 links. It's like killing your SEO. To avoid this:
- See what the valid internal links on your web page are.
- Remove any redundant links.
Make website navigation smooth and strategize link flow with the most desired internal links.
Avoid the trap of redirect loops
Redirect loops could play havoc with your website optimization. When one redirects lead to another, to next, and so on. Imagine, what will the situation of web crawler? Your essential pages won't get listed at all. One such chain is enough for blocking the web crawler. Now, how to avoid it?
- Redirect chains can arise due to external redirects. For this, stop any external redirect links.
- Extra outward migration of connections is risky. So, it is better to list them to the max of 3 internal links.
Nofollow attribute
Nofollow attribute tells the search engines crawlers that not to follow these links. They are vital if internal links lead to registration forms, paid links, or admin pages. But when we talk about internal links to crucial web pages, it is of no use.
Conclusion
For closing remarks, SEO is a process that needs profound consideration and regular checkups. In the ever-changing internet world, broken links are not a big deal. But, being aware of broken internal links makes a wise SEO strategist. It is vital to nip the evil in the bud. So, avoid these mistakes and fix them there and then. Then only it will bear healthy results.
Author's Bio:
Ravi Sharma is CEO & Founder of Webomaze Pty Ltd. He believes in serving the industry with some unique solutions with a huge variety of services including web design & web development, SEO services, eCommerce development, and so on.
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Gravatar Email - rio@webomaze.com.au