At What Point Does Interlinking Become Too Much?

[smithy]

I lost 25-30% of my traffic since the last update, and I am looking to make a few tweaks.

I altered the structure of a few pages and have already seen the benefits. Now I'm starting to wonder if I'm interlinking too much, and the effect of interlinking on SEO.

Typically:

I place 3-5 links within the body of the content
Manually add 3-10 (usually 5-6) links to the bottom of the page within the article
Mediavine add links to 3 posts that also seem to be within the content
After the post, 9 links from the category are added via a plugin.

My website is large enough with almost 600 posts, so the interlinking is related the vast majority of the time, though sometimes loosely.

Would this be having a negative effect at all?

I know Wikipedia interlinks like crazy. But I rarely come across sites that have 15-20 internal links within an article, though most of mine are added at the end of an article.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I place 3-5 links within the body of the content
Manually add 3-10 (usually 5-6) links to the bottom of the page within the article

I do the two following methods above. 3-5 links within the body and 5 at the bottom on every post. I manually choose them all so the relevance is there (and I can ensure every post is getting linked to at some point). When I publish, I go back to older posts and interlink to the just-published article, too. These are all static links that never change or rotate or are selected randomly by a theme or plugins.

So, though I'm not allowing plugins to add more related links to categories, ultimately I end up with 10+ internal links per article.

What do you imagine the negative effect would be? The only thing I can think of is if you're trying to do silos with extremely tight relevancy, or if you're trying to funnel link juice to specific pages. The more internal linking, the more you're going to redistribute page rank around until all pages get an equivalent amount. That's fine by me on this kind of site.

By the way...

I lost 25-30% of my traffic

Me too, and so did a ton of authority sites I looked up to see if I was doing anything wrong or if the core update just did it's usual thing. Looks like a ton of respectable, high DR sites got whacked pretty good. We'll claw it all back in a future update eventually. It's always the stupid pattern of Google screwing up and eventually returning site's traffic curves back to the best fit line. It'd be cool if they screwed it up and gave us traffic for once instead of always taking it.

 

[smithy]

What do you imagine the negative effect would be? The only thing I can think of is if you're trying to do silos with extremely tight reevancy, or if you're trying to funnel link juice to specific pages. The more internal linking, the more you're going to redistribute page rank around until all pages get an equivalent amount. That's fine by me on this kind of site.

I was thinking that by linking so much, I'm inevitably reducing the very tight relevancy when it would be better to add fewer but more targeted links.

Me too, and so did a ton of authority sites I looked up to see if I was doing anything wrong or if the core update just did it's usual thing. Looks like a ton of respectable, high DR sites got whacked pretty good. We'll claw it all back in a future update eventually. It's always the stupid pattern of Google screwing up and eventually returning site's traffic curves back to the best fit line. It'd be cool if they screwed it up and gave us traffic for once instead of always taking it.

Very frustrating, especially as you said in another post that it always seems to happen during these high RPM periods.

But my traffic has grown more than I expected over the past year, so I shouldn't complain too much, and it's not realistic of me to expect the upward curve to have continued indefinitely.

 

[socialpatterns]

You probably shouldn't get crazy with the number of internal links. Think more about user experience and helpfulness rather than search engines. I think the more significant issue though is the keywords in the anchor text. Post-2018 you have to be more careful with overoptimizing and using excessive exact match KW in your anchor text (internal links).

 

[smithy]

You probably shouldn't get crazy with the number of internal links. Think more about user experience and helpfulness rather than search engines. I think the more significant issue though is the keywords in the anchor text. Post-2018 you have to be more careful with overoptimizing and using excessive exact match KW in your anchor text (internal links).

Coming back to this, I wonder if this is an issue.

Exact match anchor text is used (i.e. the post title) and the links are still part of the main content, as they are listed at the bottom of the post instead of as supplemental content.

Perhaps if the links are very closely instead of loosely related, it may not be a potential issue.

All the big players seem to feature their related posts outside the main content of the page as supplemental content.

Does anyone have any thoughts?

 

[AhFreshMeat]

I’ve read somewhere (I think koray tugberk who reverse engineers google patents) that the most important links of course are placed at towards the top of the article…. And somewhat relevant links are towards the end of the article.

I simply link the 3 most relevant links in the main body towards the top (the links that i think people will actually click) and then some towards the end. I dont do more than 10 and I always link back in at least 3.

My site is doing well. Idk if 20 is necessary but 10 seems right. I also read somewhere from a google employee saying that if you have too many links, it could confuse google in regards to what your page is about. That being said… who really knows,

I know 10 works, so, I do it

 

[wikibum]

I place 3-5 links within the body of the content
Manually add 3-10 (usually 5-6) links to the bottom of the page within the article
Mediavine add links to 3 posts that also seem to be within the content
After the post, 9 links from the category are added via a plugin.

My website is large enough with almost 600 posts, so the interlinking is related the vast majority of the time, though sometimes loosely.

Would this be having a negative effect at all?

I actually had the same question. Still trying to figure it out. I don't think the number of links might be your problem. It could be over optimization due to internal linking using the same exact match anchor?

I was going to ask @Ryuzaki about that! lol Let's say you have a page about /space-shuttle-tires/ and you are linking to it internally using text anchors that are all "space shuttle tires" from 20 different posts. That's 20 internal exact anchor text links going to the same page. Would you say that is internal over optimization?

 

[Ryuzaki]

@wikibum, my opinion is that internal linking is not something Google is willing to interfere with. Throughout the years they've been unanimous is that stance too. For instance...

Gary Illyes said on /r/TechSEO on Reddit in 2019, when asked "is there an internal linking over-optimization penalty?"... his response: "No, you can abuse your internal links as much as you want AFAIK."

Matt Cutts said on a Google Search Central in 2014, when asked the same question, "Typically, internal website links will not cause you any sort of trouble. Now, the reason why I say ‘typically not’ rather than a hard ‘no’ is just because as soon as I say a hard ‘no’ there will be someone who has like five thousand links – all with the exact same anchor text on one page. But if you have a normal site, you know…a catalog site or whatever…. you’ve got breadcrumbs…you’ve got a normal template there…that’s just the way that people find their way around the site, and navigate, you should be totally fine."

John Mueller said on Twitter in 2017, when asked "Are there any differences between internal or external score/juice/strong calculation formulas?", that there "definitely" is a difference. He also has said that anchor texts used for internal links do provide context to what the link is about, which supports Google always telling us to use descriptive anchor texts internally.

I've always stood by this same conclusion that's simply borne out of experience. I've used extremely optimized anchor texts internally (which I still do to this day, but not all exact match, but very close to it), and I've also tried to have them not be optimized much at all. I've never gotten in trouble over it as far as I can tell, and I've never recovered from any hit by de-optimizing them. I can't say that I've seen a benefit from doing it one way over the other because I never created a scenario where I could do a single-variate straight comparison. At the end of the day, I simply don't think it's an issue, at all.

 

[socialpatterns]

I believe it was in 2018, Google introduced an update to level the playing field between SEOs and non-SEOs. A friend of mine lost over 50% of traffic to his high-traffic site overnight, which led me to suspect over-optimization.

He had some pages ranking #1 for great keywords and dropped, not just a few spots, but all the way down to page 14. Then I would google: Keyword Site:hisdomain.com and noticed that those same pages were also being pushed down many pages from a site: search. The pages should have been close to the top given my keyword and the site: search, which to me was a sign of being penalized.

We both agreed that he should de-optimize his content, internal links, and sidebar links, which were heavily keyword-focused. I happened to notice youtube was nofollowing their sidebar... Traditionally, it's never typically recommended to use nofollow on internal links, but I suggested he do so.

After de-optimization, his rankings and traffic returned very quickly. This experience made me question the common practice of using keyword-rich anchor text in internal links. I remember noticing other sites with over-optimized internal links never regained their traffic (but obviously could be many other factors, I didn't dig too deep).

It was the medic update I believe, but it wasn't just medical sites, it was a general update. I interpreted Google's statement on the update that it aimed to balance the playing field between SEOs and non-SEOs:

“There’s nothing wrong with pages that may now perform less well. Instead, it’s that changes to our systems are benefiting pages that were previously under-rewarded….”

You have to read between the lines with everything Google says.

Although I am pretty sure they have dialed back that particular part of the update. But who's to say they won't or (didn't) bring something like that back? Always possible.

I also admit that there are so many variables it's really hard to know (for example it could have been the over-optimization of just the content). With that said, I still feel like over-optimization can be an issue if too aggressive with exact match keywords. While I always love Gary Ilves' insights, I'd take his response with a grain of salt, as the original question that he answered had this in it: "I'm not talking about keyword stuffing the anchor text"... and that is what I am referring to.

...Just use a variety of natural, keyword-rich, anchor text, and you should be good to go.