Inner Linking + Linking To External Sources

[mrpotato]

I'm working on some site cleanups on old sites and noticed that I did what I believe is a really crappy job linking. A couple of things that I simply did which I'm questioning today.

1. Lots of inner pages have links in content to the homepage. Consider the site a magazine-style site. I thought to myself recently, where have I seen this occur in any article lately? The answer was, not many sites I've surfed at all. Not in content at least. My question is, do these links pointing to the homepage just look unnatural, and should they be removed?

2. I have lots of posts missing external links on them. Not sure why I decided to do this, but I did. Prob got greedy with link juice just as mentioned in @Ryuzaki kitchen sink post (https://www.buildersociety.com/thre...-seo-sites-with-the-kitchen-sink-method.5607/). Should I consider add these to try and make it look more natural?

3. I ended up killing a bunch of pages that were lower quality. Moving them to 410s. For those links pointing to the 410 page, I'm assuming I should remove all those links. Does that sound right?

Thanks in advance for your help all!

 

[illmasterj]

1. I'm not sure about unnatural, but remember that your logo and probably some footer nav already link to the home page, so additional in content links are probably unnecessary.

2. If we are speaking in generalities, yes it's good to link out. This is how the internet functions, so why not take part in the ecosystem? The better answer is to look at the content that ranks well for your targeted keywords. Do they link out? How often? To what sort of resources? Replicate what works.

3. If the content has links from external sites, use 301 redirects to your next most relevant page or post. Then use WPMU Broken Link Checker to replace any redirected links with the new, final URL, as well as remove any internal links returning a 410.

 

[mrpotato]

1. I'm not sure about unnatural, but remember that your logo and probably some footer nav already link to the home page, so additional in content links are probably unnecessary.

2. If we are speaking in generalities, yes it's good to link out. This is how the internet functions, so why not take part in the ecosystem? The better answer is to look at the content that ranks well for your targeted keywords. Do they link out? How often? To what sort of resources? Replicate what works.

3. If the content has links from external sites, use 301 redirects to your next most relevant page or post. Then use WPMU Broken Link Checker to replace any redirected links with the new, final URL, as well as remove any internal links returning a 410.

Thanks for the reply! Good point on number 1. Seems redundant to have this in any posts I guess at all. I'll be adding additional outlinks where I've totally missed the mark here.

The better answer is to look at the content that ranks well for your targeted keywords. Do they link out? How often? To what sort of resources? Replicate what works.

Never even thought of doing this and it's 101. Slapping myself for overthinking and not taking this step in the first place.

I have my work cutout for me as that site is 1k+ pages/posts. Time to clean house.