Why is internal link building important for SEO?

Backlinks are still one of the most important ranking factors for seo

This article is about

 Receiving many external links from quality sites increases the chances of positioning yourself well on search engines

Internal link building can have a big impact on SEO, but it must be done critically, otherwise it can compromise the good positioning of a site. A study published on SEMrush highlights which are the most common errors concerning internal links and how to solve them.

150,000 randomly selected websites, 175 million pages and 15 billion unique links were analyzed in order to understand how often internal linking problems occur. The study shows how the potential of your website is often wasted in the face of trivial errors that are easy to solve.

Each problem covered in the article will be accompanied by an explanation and the following four elements

In this article:

·         Why is internal link building important for SEO?

·         Broken internal links Broken

·         external

·         links Too many on-page links

·         Redirect and loop chains

·         Temporary

·         redirects Permanent redirects

·         How to solve the problem

·         Nofollow attributes in outgoing internal links

·         Nofollow attributes in outgoing external links

·         Orphaned pages in the site map

·         Crawl depth of page greater than 3 clicks

·         Pages with a single inbound link

·         How to solve the problem

The importance of external and internal links for your website

- gravity, that is, how much the problem affects positioning. It is classified into three levels, where 3 is the most severe;

- the advantage that can be obtained by solving the problem. This yardstick, which ranges from 1 to 3 stars, takes into account both the frequency and the criticality of the problem;

- the percentage of Internet sites, pages or links affected. Given the large amount of data analyzed, the results offer an insight into how these problems affect the network as a whole;

- the average scope that each problem has on a standard website. By not considering the extreme values ​​(higher and lower), you get a photograph of what will almost certainly occur if your site has that problem.

When it comes to link building, most of the time it refers to the activity aimed at obtaining inbound links from other sites to one's own. But internal links also have their importance because they concern accessibility to the site.

Why is internal link building important for SEO?

Backlinks are still one of the most important ranking factors; receiving many external links from quality sites increases the chances of ranking well on search engines. For their part, the internal links, often overlooked, are truly indispensable for the well-being of a website because they affect the navigability of the site and the crawlability of the content of the search engine bots.

Before tackling the topic, we feel it is advisable to familiarize yourself with some basic terms:

The  PageRank  (literally rank of a page) is a Google algorithm that assigns a value from 0 to 10 to a web page based on the links present in it, in order to define the authority. 

To put it simply, the links coming from the most popular pages, that is, which have a high PageRank, pass their value to the page that receives them, increasing their authority; those coming from pages with low PageRank, on the other hand, decrease it. The ranking power that is transferred from one site to another through links is an essential factor of link building (see Link Equity).

The  Crawl budget  is an estimate of how often the search bot will return to a website. Needless to say, the higher this value, the more Google takes a site into consideration and wants its content to compose SERPs. The limit may increase or decrease depending on the speed of the website and the freshness of the content, but there are not only these factors that influence the crawl budget. Spiders move through links, so poorly engineered internal linking (broken links, pages not found, etc.) can make bots decide not to scan all the pages on the site.

The  Links Equity , or link juice, is a metric that indicates the redistribution of value from one page to another by linking activities.

There are several types of links:

1.       internal: they link together web pages of the same site;

2.       external: they link a web page to external domains;

3.       backlinks: they are inbound links from other resources that help determine the popularity of the site;

4.       nofollow: they are links that do not exchange authoritativeness towards the recipient. To suggest that the search engine not follow the link, simply add the attribute rel = "nofollow".

Broken internal links

Internal broken links is a particularly serious problem. It can occur if there is an invalid URL or because the landing resource is no longer active. Critical issues of this type negatively affect the link equity of the site and its positioning. The broken links annoy users because they cannot reach the desired contents and suggest to Google that the site is of low quality. The problem must be solved as soon as possible because even if it is a single broken link on a page containing 20 to 100, it is enough to ruin the user experience.

How to solve the problem

It is advisable to periodically check the health of the URLs and modify the incorrect ones. If clicking on a link you come across an error message, you will have to remove the link in question or replace it with one that works. Where it is not possible to manage it, it is necessary to create a redirect from the defective page.

Broken external links

External links transfer the authority of a web page to an external resource. If by chance the owner of that resource decides to delete the page, he will end up with a broken link and both the usability of the site by users and the evaluation of the Google bot will be compromised.

How to solve the problem

Also in this case, you need to do a nice cleaning of the broken links, changing the URL if wrong or removing it if the linked page no longer exists.

Too many on-page links

When the number of links is too high, Google understands that it is a forced force to favor the positioning of the site and not to improve the user experience. The algorithm reacts by penalizing the site with the loss of positions. It should also be noted that if a page contains many links, PageRank is dispersed in many "streams", each of which will transfer a low value.

How to solve the problem

The over-optimization of internal links is resolved by eliminating excess links. This will improve the usability of the site and the distribution of the link juice.

Redirect and loop chains

Properly managed redirects can be very useful, but when there are too many you can create real chains that do not like Google. The chain increases server response time and potentially decreases link equity. It could also cause a redirect loop, which instead of returning a status code 200, returns other redirects.

How to solve the problem

To resolve the problem, the owner of the page will first need to pinpoint the cause. When internal pages are involved, redirect chains are almost always caused by website migrations.

Temporary redirects

The 302 redirect tells search engines that the redirect is only temporary and that the resource will soon be available again.

How to solve the problem

Even if PageRank now passes, the temporary redirect should only be used for the strictly necessary period of time and then removed or changed to redirect 301 if you want to move the content permanently.

Permanent redirects

The 301 redirect tells search engines that the page has been moved permanently and that the content can be found in the new URL. Even if it allows you to keep 90% of the PageRank earned over time, a minimum percentage of risk of losing traffic is not excluded, especially if you redirect to irrelevant pages. It also takes some time for Google to recognize the permanent redirect and give it the authority of the predecessor, especially if bots rarely visit the site.

How to solve the problem

When doing the 301 redirect you have to be careful not to lose SEO value. Since it is impossible to eliminate the risks, it is preferable to use them as little as possible and replace the redirects with the URL of the landing page.

Nofollow attributes in outgoing internal links

The nofollow tag is used to tell search engines not to follow a particular link by bots or to give it weight in terms of positioning.

How to solve the problem

If it is not absolutely necessary, it is better to remove the nofollow attribute because it causes you to lose many PageRank points. Matt Cutts himself explains:

“What happens when you have a page with ten PageRank points and ten outbound links, five of which are nofollow? Let's leave aside the decay factor to focus on the central part of the question. Initially, the five links without nofollow would bring two points of PageRank each (in essence, nofollow links did not count for the denominator when dividing PageRank by the page outdegree). Over a year ago, Google changed the way PageRank is distributed, so that the five non-nofollow links would bring one PageRank point each. "

Nofollow attributes in outbound external links

The nofollow tag can be useful to prevent search spiders from following direct links to untrusted sources such as spam comments. To avoid impoverishing SEO, Google suggests using the rel = "nofollow" attribute on paid links.

How to solve the problem

The nofollow attribute tells search robots not to consider a link, but it doesn't prevent users from clicking on it and losing PageRank points, so it's better to remove spammy links directly.

Orphaned pages on the site map

Orphan pages are pages that are not present in the internal linking structure of the website. Listing pages in the XML sitemap to be forwarded to Google that are not linked internally on the site is a practice to avoid because it represents an unnecessary dispersion of crawl budgets and can lead to penalties.

How to solve the problem

Google guidelines say that every page must be "reachable from at least one static text link". Therefore, after finding all the orphaned pages of a website, if you want them to be indexed, just link them to other pages of the site, if instead they are pages that have no value, they will be removed from the site map. Finally, if you want to keep the orphaned page, just tell Google not to index it by adding the noindex meta tag.

Crawl page depth greater than 3 clicks

The term crawl depth indicates the depth with which a search engine bot analyzes a website. In general, the lower a page appears in the site hierarchy, the less likely it is that crawlers and users will reach it.

How to solve the problem

The solution is to reorganize the structure of the internal links so that the most important pages can be reached with a few clicks.

Pages with one internal incoming link

As a general rule, the more internal links a web page receives, the more easily users and bots will find it. If an important page has only one inbound link, it is appropriate to review the organization of internal linking.

How to solve the problem

It is important to make sure that the content you want to push has multiple inbound links, as long as the linked pages are relevant to each other.

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