Internal linking in SEO

There are many aspects to a successful search engine optimisation campaign. Once aspect many SEO companies overlook is internal linking.

If your sites internal link architecture is well structured, then you will automatically pass Page Rank onto your inner pages. Any Page Rank gained through outbound links going to your domain will flow down the structure of the site and hence increase your rankings in the search engines for inner pages.

This is espeically true with ecommerce stores which use categories, sub-categories and product pages to represent the three levels of their site.

What I keep noticing is that many systems including bespoke systems, CMS systems and ecommerce platforms don’t think about internal linking. Often a page is linked to via many URLs causing a massive internal linking issues.

For example your site may well link to a particular product using the following URLs within the site

• /categories/categoryname/product1 – normal URL
• /bestsellers/product/product1 – This product is also a bestseller
• /categories/categoryname/categoryid/product1 – linking including the category ID

The problem here is that their is essentially only 1 product, and 3 different URLs for this product. Not only will this confuse Google as it might not know which product page is the real one. It will also mean you are splitting the links over three pages, which makes each product page less powerful in the search engines.

It also causes a massive internal duplicate content issue as the same product will have been indexed under several different URLs.

To resolve this issue you should only link to one version of the page, the other versions of the page should be 301 redirected to the main product page. You should also try to ensure that each page has less than 100 links, as Google suggests that over 100 internal links per page might damage your internal listings

Paul
SEO Project Manager