Are your internal and external links all in order? Are there too many links on the page?
Before we answer the questions above and start analyzing links on the page, let’s see what we should know about internal and external links on the page.
Basics about the impact of links
Search engines follow links, so they can crawl the website properly. If there is a page without any internal or external link referring to it, it is very difficult for a search engine to discover such a page.
That’s why you should link internally to all of your pages. The most important pages, like main categories, should be referred from the most important page of your website, which is usually the homepage.
Links also pass the link juice and therefore help your landing pages to rank well in SERP. To put it simply, “more links = better rankings”. You probably already know it is not as simple as that, but it is much more complex. However, in general, we want to link to the most important pages from as many pages as we can, both internally and externally.
But if you are linking to many different internal and external pages, the value of this link gets smaller. A few years ago, it was common practice to keep the number of your links under 100. This is not a good practice anymore, because big websites with complex structures have lots of internal links within the pages, and they just can’t remove them. So don’t follow this rule, if you stumble upon it somewhere.
The best thing you can do regarding linking is to consider if each link has a meaning and if it should really be placed there.
With Spotibo, you can get automatic results for these issues regarding links:
There are too many internal links on the page
Why does the error occur?
You have too many internal links on the page.
How does it impact SEO?
Low – Mid importance: ★★☆
The link juice of your page is divided between all these linked pages, therefore the more pages you are linking to, the less link juice is passed to each of them.
Because of that, the most important pages might have the same value as the pages that don’t matter as much. There is no optimal number of links placed on one page, but in general, you should try to keep both internal and external links under 500.
How to fix it
- At Dashboard, open issue There are too many internal links on the page.
- See Internal links in the column Links Count.
- Focus on the URLs with the highest number.
- Investigate links on this specific page and remove all links that don’t have to be there.
How do you determine which links are less important? Let me show you an example.
On the picture above is an e-commerce shop. They are linking from the navigate menu to many subcategories. They have hundreds of links on the page because of that. But it doesn’t seem necessary, right? Does the subcategory “Touch Screen” have the same value as “Home & Office”? In cases like this, we would recommend user testing to find out if customers use all of the links. If not, you should remove them.
There are too many external links on the page
Why does the error occur?
You have too many external links on the page.
How does it impact SEO?
Low – Mid importance: ★★☆
The link juice of your page is divided between all these externally linked pages and other internal linked pages. Because of that, your internal links might receive less of the link value. There is no optimal number for the links placed on one page. Spotibo warns you about external links that exceed number 100, but in general, we recommend to keep both internal and external links under 500.
How to fix it
- At Dashboard, open issue There are too many external links on the page.
- See External links in the column Links Count.
- Focus on the URLs with the highest number.
- Investigate links on this specific page and remove all links that don’t have to be there.
This problem might occur, for example, when you are listing your partners on your page and you are linking to each one of them. In case you have too many cooperators, it doesn’t always make sense to link to everybody. That’s why we recommend to consider if your user would want to click on each logo or link on the page. If not, you can link only to the most important partners and for the rest of them, it will probably be enough to mention their brand or logo.
