High-quality linking. My version of correct page linking

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Correct internal linking of website pages is one of the most important factors, which has a direct impact on both its search engine promotion and the ability to effectively interact with the target audience.

What will we get if we are not lazy and do this notorious linking correctly:

Convenience of visitors. It’s convenient when you can follow a link to get additional material, rather than looking for it somewhere else.
. By following the links, the reader views more pages and stays on the blog longer.
Increasing the weight of pages (PR) and, accordingly, the positions of these pages in search results. Internal links convey static weight just like external links. You can save a lot of money by purchasing links.
Full and improved indexing of site pages.
Additional protection of content from theft from RSS feeds by auto-filling sites. If there are internal links in the article, its text will be published along with them. So I purchased several open backlinks to your resource :-).

Automatic internal linking

This type of linking is most often implemented using plugins and is of great benefit for improving the usability of the site and its website.

With well-executed automatic linking, the user will never get lost on your site and will always easily find something useful for themselves.

So, below is my scheme for automatic internal linking. The scheme may change over time.

Sitemap is a required page for any project (not to be confused with a sitemap for search engines). Just as any book contains its content, any project should have a site map. Implemented using a plugin.
Bread crumbs. I have this function implemented through the Breadcrumb NavXT plugin. The reader can always see the path traveled from the main page and return back to any level. Useful for multi-level organization of records and search robots really like it.
Block of the most popular posts. If a post is in demand, it means it contains interesting and useful material. Visitors are encouraged to read it. Implemented via the WP-PostViews plugin.
Signature of the author with a link to the main page. This feature is included at the end of each article. Greatly adds PR to the main page.
The main blog menu is duplicated at the bottom of each page. You can implement this in the footer. Write down the titles of your pages with links to them, here is an example:

Home | Gallery | Contacts | Subscription

In my opinion, this is more than enough for automatic internal linking. Many people add a block of similar entries at the end of the article. I didn't do this intentionally for the following reasons:

Links from these blocks are not always thematic.
Extra load on the server and, as a result, slower page loading.
A large number of links with the same anchors is a great detriment for internal optimization.
These blocks have long been an eyesore for everyone and, according to statistics, their click-through rate is too low.
Unnecessarily cluttering the blog with junk.

My advice to you: tear down these blocks and breathe a sigh of relief.

Manual internal linking

This type of linking involves manually placing links from article to article. If in the case of automatic linking you don’t need to do anything, then here you will have to do a little work. But the result will exceed all your expectations if everything is done correctly.

Remember, manual internal linking is needed, first of all, to promote to the TOP of search engine results those of your articles whose positions are declining. Therefore, manual linking should be done purposefully, and not at random, so that it happens.

So, choose an article that is not in the TOP 10 (to get into the TOP 3, most often you have to buy additional external links). This will help you free service(tab " Selection of requests»).

Don’t be scared by the scary numbers of your positions; the service displays only those requests for which promotion is necessary.

Or I really like the Yandex Webmaster service. To select sagging pages, go to Search queries → Popular queries .

Start with articles that are not too far from the 10th position in the search results.

Let's assume that you already know what keywords this article will be promoted for. If not, then read the article first and only then continue reading. I advise you to do internal manual linking for LF (low-frequency) queries.

Now we need to select several donor pages (from five to ten) on which you will place links to the promoted article. Finding them is very easy. Just in search bar Yandex insert: " yours keyword site: http://your domain".

Yandex will display all relevant articles (descending from top to bottom) this request. All keywords in snippets will be highlighted in bold. We make links from them.

For achievement positive result When manually linking internally, it is very important to follow the following rules:

1. Dilute anchors, for example, “here”, “here”, “here” and the like. Try to make no more than one link to the promoted page with direct entry. The remaining links with the same anchors should not exceed 30%.

2. The number of links open for indexing on the donor page should be at the rate of 1 pc. for 1000 characters. For example, if an article has 3000 characters, place no more than 3 open links in it. The more open links, the less weight each of them transmits. Close unnecessary links with a tag.

3. The promoted article must be of high quality and provide real benefit to its readers. Otherwise, it will not last long in the TOP, no matter how you promote it.

4. Before promoting, check the optimization of the text of the promoted article. Its relevance to the search query should be 100%. I wrote how to do this.

5. Do the linking gradually using the trial and error method. First, get the desired result from promoting one article and only then proceed to the next one.

Correct internal linking of website pages updated: April 29, 2017 by: Roman Vakhovsky

Hello friends. Today I want to talk to you about competent internal linking of websites, and not just any websites, but specifically online stores. Once upon a time, when I was only working on my own informational sites, I would have started talking about content developers, but now the guys and I in the studio are working only on commercial sites, and 80% of them are online stores.

All stores are unique in their own way: different themes, engines, structures, different visions of a “convenient” website on the part of the owner. And each site has to implement solutions that are most often repeated from site to site. Today we will look at the most common linking options, among which you will definitely find something new and useful for your online store. In addition, I have provided examples bad practices how not to do it.

I described each linking option in detail, why it is important and how to implement it correctly. Well, for now, a little general theory.

What is correct linking and why is it needed?

Formally, a link from one page to another is already a link. But today we look at linking in the following way: linking is links or blocks of links that help website visitors find things faster and easier required product or service, get to the desired page. Linking a site helps search robots quickly index and re-index pages and correctly distribute static weight between them.

User interests are a priority when linking, after all, it is impossible for buyers to be shown dissimilar products in a block of similar products, or in a block of related products when buying a refrigerator, to show other refrigerators, or, for example, car tires. Everything should be in order: conversion and sales come first, and SEO is only one of the channels for attracting traffic. In practice, the benefits for SEO and for real people are perfectly combined.

So, linking should ideally solve the following problems:

Assistance in navigation for visitors;
Speeding up and improving indexing;
Transfer of static link weight the necessary pages;
There's probably something else, but it just doesn't come to mind.

General rules for linking sites

Try to adhere to the following rules when linking(regardless of site type):

Internal links should not contain the rel=”nofollow” attribute. Otherwise, the weight will flow away from the donor page, but will not be added to the acceptor page, that is, it will simply evaporate.
The rel=”nofollow” attribute must be used in cases where the link leads to a non-indexed page, but this link is necessary. Accordingly, there is no need to force the robot to follow the link and waste time and crawling budget. An example of such a case can be seen on my blog: at the bottom of the post there is a block “What’s new on the forum:”, links from there go with a redirect to the url pointing to the last post in the forum topic, which is not indexed. Ideally, you should get rid of such links using JS, as I already wrote about, the method still works.
Links should always lead to indexed pages of the site, otherwise the story described in point No. 1 above will repeat.
Even when placing internal links, you should use unique anchors when linking. Most likely, this rule is applicable in online stores only for the information section, if it exists, and for links entered manually. Other links from menus, blocks, filters, tags, etc. cannot be changed dynamically, and there is no need to, because their purpose is simply to be a reference that conveys static weight.
There are no restrictions or recommendations on the number of internal links on site pages. People often ask me, I heard somewhere that more than 150 internal links on a page is very bad, what should I do? Who said this, where this information came from - I don’t know. But I know for sure that everything depends on the specific site and the specific situation. The most important thing to consider is user convenience; there should be exactly as many links as a visitor to your site needs. If you have any doubts, just look at the sites of your main competitors; most likely, they are all similar in structure, navigation and other basic elements, you can learn from their successful experience.
Internal links should always be direct and strictly to your landing pages. This means that following the link should return a 200 OK response. I'm not talking about that broken links are unacceptable, this is obvious, but I’m talking about the fact that links should go without (and if there is not a 301, but a 302 redirect, then it’s a complete disaster). It’s not uncommon that when the structure is changed, or due to the fault of the layout designer (forgot the slash at the end of the link, for example), internal links go through a redirect, which is very difficult to track by eye. Everyone should definitely run their website at least once with a crawler, for example, or any other tool.

I would be grateful if you tell me in the comments anything else for this section from your practice. Well, I move on to describing schemes and methods for linking online stores.

Page linking schemes for online stores

What to do with the menu, how to link from it, how to get rid of unnecessary links, etc.? Personally, I believe that cross-cutting elements of a site, in particular menus, are not taken into account by search engines, or are taken into account very poorly, because are present on every page and their absence/presence changes little.

Nevertheless, there are various options. You don’t have to go far, I’ll open 4 large online stores that came to mind first: www.dns-shop.ru, www.mvideo.ru, www.eldorado.ru and www.tehnosila.ru. Let's look at each in more detail:

On the Technosila website the menu is just a menu, they decided not to do anything with it.

On the M.Video website, absolutely the entire navigation menu with categories and subcategories is closed in the noindex tag. A similar picture is on the Eldorado website. Close menu in noindex It only makes sense not to take into account its textual component, so that the menu does not end up in the snippet on search results, so that it does not interfere with determining the relevant page (although this does not happen often). In this regard, I fully support the use noindex tag, but I don’t like that this tag is taken into account only in Yandex, and Google ignores it, but in Google much more often the description content is taken as a snippet and problems with low-quality snippets rarely arise.

On the DNS site, only the deepest categories in the menu are closed in noindex (please also note that in addition to noindex, rel=”nofollow” is also used for links - why, I don’t know), and global and parent categories are indexed. Interestingly, the DNS website uses tagsAnd. These tags are not related to global search over the network, but are intended to manage indexing for corporate solutions, for example, an intranet. Apparently the crazy SEO specialists working on this site misinterpreted the meaning and application of these tags.

Menu in the footer. You don’t have to do anything with the menu in the footer, you don’t have to close it in any way, and you don’t have to worry about weight leaking onto the technical pages. As for the content, I like how it is implemented in the examples above. The menu contains contact information, social networks, as well as links to important information pages: payment, delivery, about the company, etc. It makes sense to duplicate navigation through product sections in the footer only if there are no more than 5-7 of these sections (that is, as on the vcedetyam.ru website, you DO NOT need to do it.)

Number of links in the menu. Many people worry about the number of internal links on each page of the site, and with menus like those in Eldorado and M.Video, this is not at all surprising. What can be done about this and is it necessary? Alternatively: do not display in the menu full list categories, subcategories, subsubcategories, etc. And limit yourself to displaying only the parent sections. To make it clear, I’ll show you with an example: let’s take the Eldorado website, the “Electronics” menu item, it now has about 100 links, but it was possible to display only 6 (TVs, Computers, Phones, Software, Photo and Video and Auto Products), that is, exclude child elements. But there is also a downside - the lack of detail will confuse visitors; for example, will you be able to immediately determine where to look for faxes, memory cards or headphones? Me not. So this option for “losing weight” on the menu is not always applicable; first of all, you should try to look through the eyes of your visitor (and consider him dumb, no matter how strange it may sound:), and it is advisable to test your hypotheses with some kind of A/B test.

Based on practice, I can say that manipulating links does not give any tangible SEO results. I tried removing and adding links, I tried closing links in JS - this had absolutely no effect on positions and traffic.

Breadcrumbs as a linking element

The next integral element of any website, and especially an online store, is bread crumbs. Utility of this element It’s hard to overestimate, the crumbs carry an informational and navigational meaning: by looking at them, the visitor understands which section he is in and can always go to the parent category if he is interested in a brand or product category.

Crumbs are difficult to consider as an important element for linking, because... in 95% of cases, the crumbs include the same categories and sections as in the navigation menu. In other cases, the crumbs may contain links to SEO filters from a certain category, which are generated by linking a product category with some property or characteristic. In this case, the breadcrumb link allows such filter pages to be indexed.

With breadcrumbs there are both clear and not so simple solutions:

Indexing. I am absolutely sure that there is no need to hide crumbs from indexing using noindex and/or rel=”nofollow”. Having opened a dozen well-known shopping sites, I also did not see a single case of a ban on indexing.

schema.org markup. It's worth marking bread crumbs. This will affect the beauty of the snippet on Google, although, unfortunately, it will not give anything functional. (If you remember, previously the navigation chain in Google contained clickable links, but one day they became just text.) The markup does not affect the formation and naming of the navigation chain in Yandex, but the crumbs themselves do.

Availability of the current page in the navigation. A common question is whether or not to display the title/title of the current page on which the user is located in the navigation chain. I believe that the title of the current page should be displayed as a title in a large font below the breadcrumbs, and in the breadcrumbs themselves only the parent categories should be displayed without the title of the current page.

My opinion is subjective, and you decide for yourself what you like best. By the way, on the websites of Technosila and MVideo there are crumbs without the name of the product, but on DNS and Eldorado the name of the product is present.

Drop-down menu in items. Another controversial solution is a drop-down list of categories that are on the same logical level. In some ways it's very similar to navigation menu. Here is an example that I took from the site http://ru.biksiko.com:

Or here’s another example https://004.ru/catalog/kholodilniki/

I don’t know how useful and convenient this is, but such a solution is quite rare.

Another element that is used everywhere is similar products and recommendations. This block of links, no matter what it is called and what functionality it has - similar products, recommended products, related accessories, other products of this brand, etc. – intended primarily for the user. And it has a marketing purpose: a second joystick for a console, a bracket for a TV, a mouse pad - all this is to sell an additional product, and not for SEO.

This is a link only formally. If we talk about SEO, then we need some more technical/algorithmic approach to linking, one of such algorithms is ring linking.

Ring linking

I don’t know who came up with the logic of work and the name of this algorithm. Although I thought that I had come up with it when I used this algorithm for my sites, and then released two modules for DLE. But it turned out that everything was invented before us: there are mentions on the Internet earlier than my posts about linking and modules. But this is absolutely not important now.

The main task of circular linking is to distribute weight evenly between pages of the same level. The main marker in this case is the page id in the database. That is, there is a sequential selection and substitution of links to products that come before or after the current product. For example, each page links to 10 previous pages, and at the end the chain closes, linking the very first and the very last product in the chain. With this algorithm, each page will accurately receive the same number of incoming and outgoing links, as well as the same internal weight. Dropping pages from the index from the chain does not break the algorithm, because we link to 10 pages at once. I think you understand the principle of operation.

I made modules for circular linking for my information and entertainment sites and tested them only there, but theoretically this should work for any site with a large number of pages. According to my experiments, this gave an amazing result: thanks to this linking, I achieved 100% (and not approximately, but exactly, page to page) indexing of absolutely all pages for sites where I used the module.

It is logical that there cannot be any talk of any similarity between pages or products if the selection is simply based on id from the database. To do this, in the module I came up with restrictions that at least somehow solved this problem - make a selection by id, but within a certain category or subsection. Thanks to this, it was possible to achieve the output of the same type and similar links without breaking technical requirements– not one huge ring was formed for the entire site, but many rings within the categories.

If we talk about online stores, then in my entire life I have seen only one single store that uses ring linking - www.haldi.ru. You can see an example by going to the page of any product and scrolling down to the “Other products” block.

To maintain the similarity of products, a restriction was made on the removal of products from the common parent category. As you can see, there is still no need to talk about similarity. In general, the site is quite interesting in terms of SEO, many different teams were involved in its promotion (including my team), so I recommend you study it.

To summarize, I will say that this is a very dubious linking option for an online store and I am unlikely to recommend it.

Random linking

An even more ridiculous version of linking, which I called “random linking”. Under this name you can combine several types of linking. The first option is pure random linking, when there is a certain block in which links to N are displayed random pages. Links can be either dynamic, that is, each time you visit the page, the set of links changes, or static, that is random set links are cached in the database on the first visit to the page and are displayed in this form on subsequent visits.

Another option is to link pages by search queries transitions. If you remember, about 6 years ago there was an HTracer script that pulled the page address and search query from the referrer, if the transition was made from a search engine and saved to the database, then a block with links was formed on the site pages, which in the anchor contained the keyword for which there was a transition from the search. There was also a module for DLE, it seems it was called “Transitions” and had similar functionality. Soon, search engines filtered sites using a similar linking scheme, quite rightly regarding this as search spam. I wanted to find a live example for you or take a screenshot, but I didn’t find a single site with such a scheme, even among Warez sites, not to mention online stores.

You can come up with many dubious schemes if you wish: a block with links to non-indexed pages to speed up their indexing, a block with links to pages that have a maximum/minimum number of visits, in order to pump them up with static weight.

Linking from category/product descriptions

Another useless activity, in my opinion, is placing links from SEO texts in categories or product descriptions to other categories or products.

Firstly, SEO descriptions in categories Online stores are not made for people to read, it’s stupid to hide this, realizing that only a SEO specialist could go to the site with the request “buy a 4K TV” and become interested in the text, not the goods :) Isn’t it? Consequently, there is no benefit for visitors from links from the description, and I don’t see any SEO benefit from links from the description on the scale of a large site. I’m talking about SEO benefits because I had to put such links in my work and I can say that I have never seen any effect from them.

Have you ever seen it yourself link from product descriptions in an online store? Not from the characteristics, but from the description text. I don’t remember such stores, but my colleagues helped me find an interesting one - the Labyrinth bookstore.

Example from the pages http://www.labirint.ru/books/409187/ and http://www.labirint.ru/books/320735/

Anchors for “book”, “because”, “time”! This is crazy, they just do a word search from the description that matches the book title and link. They also link to the main page and key sections. You can go around the site and look at it.

This is complete nonsense. Such links will be followed only by accident; the “ala Wikipedia” effect does not work - the links are not contextual and it is not clear where they lead. By the way, the HTracer script, which I already mentioned, had the same functionality; it searched for suitable words taking into account morphology and linked articles to each other within the site. I tried this on my infosites, but to no avail, although I firmly believe that if it could ever work, it would have been back then (6 years ago), and not today.

Stop writing about useless techniques, after all, I should write about what will bring a positive effect, and not vice versa.

Linking from information section publications

In almost any commercial topic there are many information requests that cannot be covered by categories, products, or other pages. And it happens that for general queries information articles are shown instead of product pages. A striking example from my practice is the theme of stores for adults (sex shop, it so happens that we work a lot with them), just for fun, enter “vibrator” in Yandex and look at the results. Sometimes the only option to get into the top is to create a high-quality information article on the site.

For one of our clients, we went this route. The entire catalog, categories and subcategories, filters and tags, product pages - everything was polished and brought to perfection, even unique texts were written on each page. In my experience there simply has not been a more developed site, I’m serious. But the traffic stubbornly refused to go to commercial pages. When I collected the SYNOPSIS, I did not delete information queries, but clustered them and put them into separate group, in the end I received about 50 topics for future publications. Since the site already had an articles section, we immediately began to slowly fill it. To my surprise, information requests began to shoot into the top 1-top 3 of Yandex and Google. As a result, the traffic on the site was increased to 700-900 visitors per day, and only 15-20% of the traffic went to commercial pages. Of course, we linked the articles to the relevant product categories and filters (no more than 3-4 links per publication).

But there was a better decision that we made - to create contextual product informers. That is, the blocks where the most popular goods from the corresponding catalog category. With price, name, rating, ability to add to cart, etc. It turned out very organic and cool.

Despite all the coolness, the client’s business never became successful. But this is beyond the scope of this post, and certainly the failure has nothing to do with the linking we are talking about :)

There is another example in our practice, this time positive. For certain categories of products, next to the characteristics and descriptions, links to instructions for installation and care of the product are displayed. Judging by the behavior, these pages are useful to customers; they read them and save them as pdfs. For the most popular pages We even recorded videos. Instructions rank well in searches and generate clicks. Knowing this, we placed product informers on them. As a result, several dozen orders are placed per month from such pages.

With this example, I wanted to remind you that linking is not done for the sake of linking, but for the sake of a certain result - sales. So I advise you to jerk off not to anchors and the number of internal links, but to something more pleasant :) Well, you understand...

Another good example information page with product informers and multiple linking on Yandex.Market. I understand that it’s very strange to focus on Yandex in terms of SEO, but it’s worth focusing on in terms of conversion and sales.

Tagging for an online store / SEO filters

I’m sure each of you has heard about tagging, burning or expanding semantics, SEO filters, etc. All this is about the same thing - creating additional landing pages for search queries (usually low frequency queries). The trend is 3-4 years old, no more. They rose and flourished on this wave (the post about clusterizers was written a long time ago, you can imagine how many more of them have appeared since then).

For online stores, large portals, catalogs, tagging is the most effective and understandable way to generate traffic from search engines. Even before it became a trend and people started talking about it publicly and often, I was already practicing this approach. As one of the most striking examples, I published and clearly showed how this affects traffic.

Advanced agencies and studios have been practicing SEO filters for several years, and the network has already accumulated quite a few sites with deep semantics. In Moscow and other large cities, everything is polished in competitive topics; there, the use of tagging is no longer an innovation that puts you ahead of your competitors, but rather an attempt to keep up. It’s easier in the regions, thoughtful SEO beats out competitors, but this will come to an end.

Six months ago there were rumors that Yandex was going to punish for the senseless and unjustified generation of such SEO filters, as for low-quality and useless pages (remember the times of the AGS). But the case died down, and I did not observe a single case of punishment. Yandex's motives are clear - no one needs categories with only a few products, or if the products do not meet expectations. Wait and see.

As I already said, SEO filters are usually obtained from a combination of product category and some properties. The most common example of a filter is brands. The easiest way to imagine this is with an example household appliances, for example, TVs, where links with brands have a higher frequency than the general request without a brand. Next come the properties inherent in a certain product category, in the case of TVs these are: matrix type (LED, OLED, LCD, plasma), resolution (Full HD, 4K, 8K), technologies (3D, Smart TV, Android), type (curved , with backlight), etc. It is very easy to extract such filters from product specifications, or to extract “popular filters” from Wordstat. Cross filters often work - for example, linking properties with brands - Samsung 4k TV, Philips TV with Ambilight lighting.

Such filters are made for SEO; accordingly, pages must be prepared and optimized for them - titles, meta tags, descriptions. Links to such pages come directly from the filter block, or are created as separate subcategories, it all depends on the complexity of the technical implementation:

The Technopark online store is generally a nerd with filters. All filters in the sidebar are clickable and go to the corresponding highly searched pages. There is no other way, competition is tough!

There are less elegant solutions, just a random set of links to filters according to search queries. Like on Wikimart. Very ugly:

Another ugly example. I found this page in the top 10 in Moscow for the query “buy a TV.” For some reason it doesn't rank general category TVs, and the tag “cheap”, which generally has a blank page:

So, we found out about tagging and talked about links from the filter block in categories. It’s not difficult to find examples of implementation - take any site from the top in Moscow for a general request.
Personally, I think we need to go further and do what no one else is doing. I persistently scrolled through the TOP50 in Moscow for electronics and did not find a single example of what I wanted to show you - links to SEO tags from product characteristics. Apart from our clients, I can only remember one site where I saw a decent implementation, this is SotMarket, which slipped into complete shit, turning into a doorway. However, remnants of its former glory are still there:

Pay attention to the underlined text - these are links to the corresponding SEO filters. I dare to suggest that sometimes this can be useful for live visitors.

The benefits for promotion and search robots are obvious - a large number of Internal links give a lot of static weight to pages and will keep them in the index. In short, a cool solution, but not easy to implement, at least, our clients pay a lot of money for such implementations to their programmers or contractors. Believe me, it's worth it!

Verdict: linking is good!

You have read a large post with tips and live examples, and I wanted to end here, but I decided that it would be wrong to just take and leave you alone with your thoughts, questions and, possibly, doubts. So let's put together some summary + short answers to questions that weren't discussed:

It can be stated with absolute certainty improving indexing due to linking– often pages are not indexed or fall out of the index as being of insufficient quality; in fact, they simply lack weight, and this weight will be given to them by internal links.

Number of links for linking it doesn’t matter - there is no precisely defined number of links from a page that would be considered normal. There should be exactly as many links as will be enough for live site visitors to navigate the site comfortably. Go to the metrics web viewer and view several dozen records of visitor behavior. You will be surprised by the results!

How does internal linking affect positions? Not directly. But thanks to interlinking, the pages are confidently kept in the index, and due to more static weight the page should rank better for all targeted requests, but not separately for any request. Please note that we are still talking about online stores and automatic linking from menus, filters, blocks and everything else that we talked about above.

How to choose the right scheme - linking from product cards to categories, from categories to product cards, or from products to products? Previously, there were a lot of conversations on this topic and, it seemed, they came to a logical conclusion: if the pages of product cards have the greatest traffic potential, then we should try to distribute all the weight on them, if categories, then try to link to categories as much as possible from product cards. Let me give you an example: when buying a laptop or phone, most people ask specific model laptop or phone, respectively, product cards have the greatest potential. If a person is looking for wallpaper, for example, he is unfamiliar with the article numbers or names of specific wallpaper collections, he searches for “buy wallpaper,” adding at most a color or property to the request (vinyl, non-woven, paintable). IN in this example Categories, subcategories and SEO filters have potential. It is absolutely clear what types of pages need to be promoted, but I deny the need to purposefully put more links somewhere, and deprive some pages of these links. In my work, I adhere to the schemes I described, without changing them in any way depending on the type of pages being promoted.

Manual linking inappropriate for online stores. The only place where manual labor can be useful is information section, there you will have to put it wisely contextual links implement product informers on the relevant sections and or product cards. In other places this type Slave labor should not be used :)

Finally, I'm done. If I find in the comments interesting questions, I will add the answers to them to my list. In the meantime, thanks for your attention!

See you later, friends.

Best regards, Alexander Alaev

Although the very concept of internal linking is as old as the world, many website owners and optimizers neglect it. But in vain, because competent linking can not only help users quickly and conveniently navigate through the pages of a site, but also increase the efficiency of promoting certain pages.

The very definition of internal linking follows from the above - this is setting up internal links between pages of one site in order to transfer weight to more significant pages.

What kind of linking is there?

There are quite a lot of types of internal linking, but they all boil down to one thing - the correct setting of the link anchor. We have already talked about anchors for links in more detail in our article “What are anchors? ", which I highly recommend reading. Correctly selected link text is almost half the success when linking.

Among the automatic links on the site, we can highlight such elements as “Breadcrumbs” and “ HTML map site." Very useful for site users who, while walking around the resource, will never get lost and can easily return, for example, to a product category. The site map will allow us to correctly distribute the weight across the pages, which gives us not only convenience for visitors, but also a positive effect during promotion.

The same type of linking also applies to the output on the article/service/product page of a module. Similar articles. The presence of such a module very well helps to improve the behavioral factors of the site, allows you to transfer weight to similar pages and keep the visitor on the site for a longer time.

There is another type of linking, which applies to both automatic and manual types - this is the creation of a menu with sections and subsections. Here you can and should indicate the exact names of the pages to which we link. All anchors are perfectly taken into account by search robots and help promote internal pages.

In no case should a situation be allowed where it is not possible to get to a website page from the main or one of the side menus; such navigation will be illiterate and will not work as efficiently as possible.

Weight and internal linking schemes

To choose the right linking scheme, you need to take into account all factors, such as the theme of the site, the goals set, and the queries being promoted.

We will analyze the most commonly used and popular schemes for promoting HF, MF and LF requests.

In conclusion, we can only summarize that for competent linking With maximum benefit To promote, you must follow three rules:

Well-configured website navigation
Using a suitable linking scheme
Precisely selected link anchors

Note that internal linking is part of the site’s link profile, and this is one of the most important blocks of work in resource promotion. To get to the TOP, and not under filters, we recommend monitoring the quality of your link profile. Here is a webinar to help you, which tells you how to check your link profile and what it should be like.

Promote your website correctly and do it comprehensively! In addition to linking, there is still a lot of important and necessary things. The optimal list of work that needs to be done to promote a website is included in the “Search Engine Promotion” service. You can simply go through the list, like a checklist, to understand how well your SEO has worked.

I welcome my dear readers to my blog page. Today I will share with you my secrets of creating the correct internal linking of website pages. Many people have probably come across the concept of page linking more than once, but not everyone knows what a powerful value it represents when promoting sites on the Internet. When conducting consultations on the promotion and optimization of client sites, the same question is asked: “How do you promote your website?” I hear the same answer that there is a purchase of links in Sape and a lot of eternal news links, which seems to be correct, but as soon as the topic of internal optimization comes up, it’s like everyone learned about it for the first time. That’s why I want to give a detailed manual on internal link optimization and show how this moment important when getting into the TOP of Yandex and Google.

Correct internal linking of website pages and how to do it yourself

So let's get started. First of all, we need to understand the essence and purpose of internal linking, namely, answer the questions “Why? How? For what?". To be honest, not so long ago I myself didn’t really understand how to do this correctly. It seems that everything is simple, you stupidly take it and make a link to the rest of the pages, but that’s not the case, it turns out that a random bunch of pages can even do a lot of harm and is regarded by search engines as internal spam. As a correct set of pages, we can highlight our favorite Vekipedia, which many use as an example as a standard of quality.

Now we need to define the main purpose of the internal link of pages in more detail:

1) Improved promotion. Yes, it seems like where does this effect come from? And the whole point is that if you run your own blog or website of a company that has a section with articles on the topic, then proper linking will help bring the site to the TOP for low-frequency queries, which in turn will help push mid-frequency queries. But you shouldn’t rely only on internal links, external factors will also play their role in the complex. You know, it’s as if you paid attention to the health of only one part of your body and took care only of the liver, and did not care about the problems of all other organs, but in the end the whole body will suffer and have consequences in all directions. Well, I think you understand what I mean.

Everything is built around links, and the more authoritative the link, the higher this or that page you promote will be in the TOP of search results. As you know, each page has its own weight and authority, especially old materials that have good traffic and the page’s PR indicator. And the more links there are between pages, the more weight will be transferred from trust materials to the rest and back, increasing and distributing the total weight across all pages of the site, creating positive link profile.

2) Fast indexing new pages. And here, competently configured and technically correct internal linking of site pages influences this factor like no other. I always try to make a link from the old page after publishing a new post. This is like a recommendation for already established material, but for a newbie, the same analogy is used when receiving links from trust sites, the old warrior recommends paying attention to the young one. Analyzing the indexing speed on my blog, I can say that a new post is indexed within 1-2 days. It also depends on the frequency of filling the blog with new content. The point here is to search for materials with the desired anchor, where there is a mention on the topic of the new post from which you can link.

3) Improvement of behavioral factors. If you look at many sites from the point of view of search engines, then special emphasis will be placed on usability and competent navigation among sections. As has been said more than once, first of all, the site should be made for people, and people don’t want to bother and look for what they need among a bunch of articles. For this purpose, a site map and structured categories by topic are created. You need to put yourself in the user's shoes first and foremost. If you are reading an interesting article that involves various branches on a given topic, why not link to other materials to give more understanding of the topic to your reader and avoid users returning to search and spending more time on your site.

If the pages of your site are competently optimized and be in the search results, and users, having gone to you, will click on internal links; this will undoubtedly affect the results, which is very popular with search engines, who will definitely notice all this and trust you, which will also affect the search results.

Go to the Yandex Metrica service yourself and look at the indicators internal transitions and the time users spend on the site, if these indicators are negligible, then it’s time to think about linking and after several Yandex ups (3-4) observe the changes. I'm sure they will make you very happy.

As you understand, having the correct combination of all pages is not only necessary for good site navigation, but also for promotion required pages transferring the weight to them, which is completely free and only requires time and knowledge. Essentially, you create links that, along with purchased ones, will give a powerful push forward for the necessary queries without spending your budget.

Today a powerful fight against purchased links has begun, and against this background, internal links give very good effect compared to purchased ones. Many blogs that have thousands of visitors don’t spend practically a penny on buying links, but get out only due to good behavioral and quality content. So, now I’ll tell you what internal linking methods you can use on your website for the best effect.

There are methods for automatic linking by placing internal links using various plugins, as well as creating links in manual mode. Some people choose one of the methods, but I use both, which gives a greater effect.

Site preparation and analysis

But before we start placing internal links to other pages, we need to run our site through one interesting and free program (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html).Install it on your computer and enter the address of our website. Then we get a full report using the links. If the line is highlighted in red, it means the link is broken or inactive, and all green means it is completely in order. But please note that some pictures and files should not be links and their red color should not confuse you.

The report looks something like this:

After we have cleared the site of unnecessary links, you can begin to analyze the materials and choose a method for linking your materials.

We don’t ignore the detailed analysis of your website code for errors in sections and structure of the materials themselves. Check the main title tags, and also check the description, keywords and title. Third-party tools are suitable for this, or it’s worth ordering SEO site audit.

An automatic way to create internal website linking

This method is used on large portals and blogs that have great amount pages and categories. If you use CMS such as Joomla or Wordpress, then download and install required plugin it won't be difficult. In the articles themselves, I always do manual linking, but after each article a useful plugin for Joomla called ExtraNews helps me.

The installation process is simple, like all extensions in Joomla, but in the settings you need to set required values. For example, I have a display of random materials on the topic of the post and it looks like this:

The plugin is very convenient for creating related materials or just random materials from a blog using links with the text of the title itself as anchors, thereby diluting the overall anchor list. By the way, immediately after this post you will be able to see that same plugin in action.

Another interesting aspect of automatic linking can be considered the popular materials module; by the way, I also created it in the sidebar, from which there are links to frequently viewed materials. And such things, along with the presence of “bread crumbs”, are very good to eat search robots, coming to the site, since in addition to the site map, a complete overview of all the materials and sections where our robot will be walking is given. In addition to good indexing, pages will be able to evenly receive the desired weight and thereby push other pages forward.

There are also plugins such as SeoLinks, the essence of which is to automatically place anchors with links to similar pages directly from the text itself, but this method is very dangerous, since there is a possibility of incorrect placement of anchors and the creation of duplicates. But it’s up to you to decide and choose.

An example of proper linking of website pages

This is the most reliable way get quality links and focus on the most important pages your website. You can’t just go ahead and scatter all the links just because you feel like it. You need to clearly understand why you are doing this and how you choose a donor to install a link. The essence here is the same as with . We must find pages that are relevant to the request, which we will promote forward, and links to them should be obtained from those that are less relevant to our main request.

To find a relevant page, we need to enter our key and site address in the search bar; this combination looks like this:

site:www.site site optimization

Below will be a complete list of pages on your blog, starting from, according to Yandex, to less relevant. This is where our snippet will come to our aid. I hope you are writing it when publishing your materials (read the post ""), but even if you did not write it as expected, the robot will automatically produce a piece of text from our article, where we will see our future placements of links to the relevant one highlighted in bold page. But you shouldn’t stupidly take and use the same anchors in links; you need to dilute the key with some neighboring words or use larger phrases. As an example, we received this list, which shows the main page for the request and its donors for links.

Now just go to the articles below and select our anchor + dilution and make a link to the promoted page. And we do this with all promoted pages. But pay attention to the anchor list, which should always be different, otherwise you may get link spam.

the link should be in the whole paragraph, and not just in one separate sentence as a callout;
put the link as much as possible in a natural way, as if you want to provide a link to more complete material that is related to what you are reading now, but you cannot put everything in one article and therefore recommend something else;
dilute the list of link anchors using both anchor and non-anchor texts;
You shouldn’t rely too much on automatic link plugins, which over time may become outdated and incompatible with your project;
try to put a link from the materials and to the main page, giving it your weight;
use donors of less relevant pages to boost the main query;
do not make links to service sections, such as site map, site search, etc.;
work on the structure of the entire site and setting up a site map, breadcrumbs and structured sections.

Schemes for linking website pages

You should never use the so-called ring linking system; in the best possible way will link to site materials that are useful in topic and meaning. It is also necessary to determine the weight of the pages being promoted and make a switch from less significant to more popular pages for promotion with the presence of low-frequency queries.

But don’t rush to immediately run and change all your links, as this must be done gradually and see the result after the main Yandex updates. In any case, work on the usability of your site and on competent and convenient navigation, which in turn have about 30% success in promoting the necessary pages and the entire site as a whole.

As for the question of how many links to put from an article to other materials, then take it as a rule that for every 1000 characters of an article you need to take 1 outgoing link, but even if there are more links, then no negative aspects were noticed, especially if there are what to refer to. There is no need to link for the sake of it.

I hope my experience will be useful to you and help you achieve results using only knowledge and not spending huge amounts of money for promotion.

I bring to your attention an interesting video interview on proper internal linking and program review. Enjoy watching.

Sincerely, Galiulin Ruslan.