When developing a link-building strategy, many digital marketers mistakenly prioritize backlinks over internal links.
While backlinks are valuable, internal links are the glue that connects your domain's pages, supporting site structure and offering context to search engines. The benefits of internal linking range from enhancing the user experience to improving engagement metrics.
Plus, your internal linking strategy is fully within your control — unlike external links.
However, there are still many challenges to internal linking at scale. This post will teach you the most common issues with internal links (and how to fix them!) so you get the most value from your links.
Table of Contents:
Top Internal Linking Mistakes In Order of Priority
Some internal linking mistakes will have a larger impact on your site's SEO success than others.
To help you prioritize your efforts, we've organized the most common internal linking issues into three categories (technical, site taxonomy, and relevancy problems) and laid them out by order of importance.
Priority 1: Technical Issues
The most common (and the most detrimental) internal linking mistakes deal with technical issues and implementation. Here are some frequent technical issues to look out for...
1. Orphaned Pages
Orphaned pages refer to pages that have no internal links pointing to them, isolating them from the rest of the site.
They are especially frustrating because Google may not even index them!
To solve the problem of orphaned pages, regularly audit your site to identify pages without internal links and create relevant links to these pages from other high-traffic areas of your site. Implementing a system for continuous monitoring can help prevent future orphaned pages.
2. Too Many Links On a Page
Another common technical issue is having too many links on the page that is linking out. This number goes beyond hyperlinks in the main body content — links in the header and footer count, too.
How many internal links is too many?
While there isn't a hard and fast limit on the number of internal links on a page (large ecommerce sites can get away with thousands), it’s generally recommended to stay in the range of 100 internal links on average to maximize the number of URLs crawled and followed.
The key is to avoid over-stuffing and ensure a good user experience.
TIP: Look at Google Analytics to review the links that no one clicks and consider removing them.
3. Unintended Noindex or Nofollow Tags In Your Crawl Pattern
Other common technical linking mistakes are unintended noindex or nofollow tags in your crawl pattern (these can prevent Google from properly crawling and assigning authority to your pages).
To fix unintended noindex or nofollow tags in your crawl pattern, conduct a thorough audit of your site's meta tags to identify and correct any mistakenly applied noindex or nofollow attributes. Ensure that critical pages are indexable and followable.
4. Pages Restricted By Robots.txt
Pages may also be restricted by robots.txt.
As such it's important to review and update your robots.txt file to ensure it isn't blocking important pages. Additionally, include these pages in your XML sitemap to guide Google's crawler.
Recommended Reading: Common Robots.txt Issues and How to Avoid Them
We recommend taking care of these technical issues before moving on to the next priority: taxonomy.
Priority 2: Site Taxonomy Issues
Other than technical issues, the most common problems with internal links deal with the hierarchy of the links and determining which links point where.
You can think of your links and your site taxonomy as a tree branching out.
Following this visual, you should connect pages to each other that follow the same hierarchy (or branch), building out a link graph in a logical structure.
For sites with thousands of pages, optimizing an internal link structure poses a significant challenge. Fortunately, seoClarity's Link Optimizer provides an automated solution that matches existing content with the most relevant pages on your site while still leveraging your input.
Recommended Reading: Internal Linking Strategies to Build Site Authority in SEO
Paying attention to the site taxonomy also relates to the anchor text of the links. The common issue here is using the wrong anchor text, which is a missed optimization opportunity to tell the search engine what keyword you want a page to rank for.
It’s also recommended to avoid using the same anchor text for multiple pages.
Priority 3: Relevancy Issues
Once your pages and links follow a logical hierarchy, it's time to focus on relevance.
A common mistake is linking to irrelevant pages or those that don’t fit contextually. This can confuse users and dilute the value of your links.
Ideally, all relevant pages should be connected in a way that enhances the user experience, guiding visitors naturally through related content and making it easier for search engines to understand the structure of your site.
TIP: Classify your internal links by content type to organize them by topic. This allows you to create a circular reference where similar pages link together and connect back through the homepage.
Problem Solved: Internal Link Analysis at Scale
As you’ve seen, there’s a lot to consider when resolving internal linking mistakes. This is where SEO technology comes in.
Our Internal Link Analysis functionality, for example, assists with finding stops in your crawl pattern by identifying areas that contain nofollow, noindex, robots.txt or canonical to another page.
Those technical issues from priority 1 are already being solved!
Follow along our internal links workflow to gain more site authority.
You can also use it to identify the source of the internal link and next destination URL and any issues in the crawl patterns. This is more advanced than your typical internal links checker and a critical view to have if you’re going to actually fix them.
Returning to anchor text, the analysis can be used to review hyperlinks’ anchor text and locate similarities across multiple page types. If the anchor text is generic, you can go in and update it.
The view below shows a summary of the internal linking anchor text with the count of internal links that use it, and the count of unique pages that are linked by it.
(Anchor text report in the Internal Link Analysis)
The analysis also allows you to review metrics that assist in weighting internal links and identify areas where internal links are not passing equity and value.
The functionality doesn’t end there! Receive intelligent recommendations that highlight all the pages where you should add links, and verify the relevancy with a link score.
SEO automation enters the conversation with the ability to have pages that mention a certain keyword or page automatically link to that mentioned target page. This immediately solves for orphaned pages!
Pretty cool, right? We’d love to give you a 5-day free trial to explore Internal Link Analysis and the rest of the seoClarity platform.
Summary
From resolving redirect chains and fixing broken internal links to ensuring contextual relevance, there are many internal linking mistakes to keep an eye out for.
But with the right SEO technology that can audit your linking structure, you’ll be able to provide a healthy experience to both users and search engines.
<<Editor's Note: This piece was originally published in July 2021 and has since been updated.>>
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