Google warns against overuse of internal links
In order for your content to to be visible or to rank on Google, search engines run through your content to rank it. When your articles and pages are linked to from elsewhere on the internet, Google discovers them easier. Internal links connect your content and offer an insight to Google on your website’s structure. The process of interlinking can help you create a hierarchy as a handout of the most important pages and articles with greater link value than less important ones. But, using too many internal links on the same page, according to Google, might dilute their value.
Internal link development is a wealth of SEO and something that you have total control over. Meanwhile, ‘using too many internal links on the same page might dilute your value, as Google’s John Mueller suggests. On July 2, 2021, during the Google Search Central SEO hangout, Mueller also explained what could be done instead of getting rid of the internal links.
In order for the search engine to consider a page important, it follows the internal linking process. One internal link signal could notify Google of the importance but this gradually dips as more links are added to the page. Several links will most definitely will make your page seem less important to the search engine.
“And similar to the second question you had there, with regards to internal links doing more harm than good — yes, if you do dilute the value of your site structure by having so many internal links that we don’t see a structure anymore, then that does make it harder for us to understand what you think is important on your website.
And I think providing that relative sense of importance is sometimes really valuable, because it gives you a little bit more opportunity to kind of fine tune how you’d like to be present in the search results.
If you tell search engines pretty clearly and directly, well this is my primary page, and from there you link to different categories and the categories link to different products, then it’s a lot easier for us to understand that if someone is looking for this category of product, this is that page that we should be showing in the search results.
Whereas if everything is cross-linked then it’s like, well any of these pages could be relevant. And then maybe we’ll send the user to some random product instead of to your category page when you’re actually looking for a category of products.”
Internal links are also used by Google to better comprehend a site’s basic structural set up. A sitemap may also be utilised to convey the correct information, but a logical structure of internal connections makes it much more obvious. Could having too many internal links be a negative thing, given how helpful they are?
Excessive use of internal links throughout a website might cause issues. The first difficulty is that Google will be unable to comprehend the structure of the site. Web owners should aim for an internal link structure that mimics the structure of their own site, according to Mueller’s suggestion.
