Common Mistakes While Interlinking the Content

Internal linking is one of the important factors in your website because it works as a bridge between one page to another; it helps visitors in navigating your website and showing them useful content. However, still, there are many chances that while internal linking you make some common mistakes which can cost you your website ranking.

In this article, we will learn about the same, common mistakes you make and how to fix them.

Let’s begin!

Why is Internal Linking Important As Per SEO?

Search engines not only rank your website only, but they also rank individual pages of your site on SERP. Mostly website receives traffic and links on their homepages from the search engines, and often forget the importance of deep internal pages. These internal pages also play an important role in terms of SEO. Thus, they need their own internal linking. This internal linking help connecting your content and give Google an ideology about your site structure and how it is navigating the users. These links allow you to mark the most important pages and posts with more link value as compared to others.

Thus, using the right internal linking strategy is a must!

How to Identify Internal linking Mistakes?

An effective internal link strategy is very much useful for building robust site architecture and represent it to Google. Moreover, you can make sure that all the internal links placed on your site are working.

Fortunately, there are many free tools available in the market, which will help you in identifying all the issues going with your internal linking process.

Here are some tool suggestions for you:

1. Site Link Analyzer Tool – SEO Chat

2. Link Vendor

3. Internal Link Checker – SEOConsult

4. Internal Links Check – WordPress Plugin

5. W3C Link Checker

Common Mistakes & How to Fix Them?

1. Broken Internal Links –

If a particular link is not working, then definitely there will be a crawlability issue for Google. There can be any reason for a link to be not in working stat such as – malfunctioned URL, maybe page link is dead, or it is broken, or it no longer exists. If the reason is a broken link, then let me tell you that broken links often impact ranking in a negative way of that webpage. Google addresses broken links as low-quality links. It is often said that one rotten apple is enough to spoil other apples in the basket; the same goes with the broken links; even one broken link is enough for a negative impact.

How To Fix This Issue –

• All you have to do is to check on the following things:
• Link of the URL is correct.
• If webpage return error, then changes the link or remove it.
• If the link is not manageable, then create or redirect it from the broken page.

2. Too Many On-Page Links –

If you put too many links on your page, then it will look like spam. Thus, it will affect the ranking.

How To Fix This Issue –

It is advisable here to use fewer links with precise and planned thoughts. Also, keep in mind why these links are essential for your site and audience.

3. Redirect Chains And Loops – Creating redirects from one page to another is great, but, it becomes a risk when done incorrectly because it severely damages your user experience and valuable rankings. If you use long redirect chains and endless loops, then your website may start working slowly and also confuse the search bots, and where to follow next.

How To Fix This Issue –

To avoid such confusion you can directly link to your destination pages, and if you need to redirect, you can do it directly for your final page.

4. Nofollow Attributes in Outgoing Internal Links –

Nofollow tags are the tags that tell the crawlers not to follow them. So in the internal linking cases, there is no need to use the no-follow tag for internal links.

How To Fix This Issue –

The only thing you can do is to check whether there is a need for a no-follow tag or not. If not, then it is a wise idea to remove it.

5. Nofollow Tags in Outgoing External Links –

To prevent spiders from following the untrusted sources you can use the no-follow tags. Google also recommends using a no-follow tag on such sources.

How To Fix This Issue –

A simple no-follow tag can avoid the untrusted sources, so use it or if possible remove the link of such doubtful sources.

6. Orphaned Sitemap Pages –

A page without any internal link from a website is known as an orphaned page.

How To Fix This Issue –

So, check all the orphaned pages and if they have useful content, then it is advisable to connect that page internally and make Google index it.

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