We collected the most popular questions of our readers concerning an interlinking of the website and prepared answers to them.
1. Why do we need the interlinking?
Competently organized interlinking of the website is important both for correct indexing of the website by SE robots, and for users. Specifically:
- It allows SE robots to understand the structure of the website and to index pages quicker;
- It specifies to SE robots the relevant document on the promoted requests;
- It helps search robots to evaluate the importance of these or those pages of the website;
- It has a positive effect on behavioral factors of ranging;
- It helps visitors to get oriented on the website easily and to find required services, goods or answers to questions.
Thus, organizing an interlinking of the website competently, you improve the indexation of the website and behavioral factors that, as a result, will exert a positive impact on ranging of the website in general.
2. How many internal links should be put to achieve the effect?
While implementing the interlinking, first of all, it is important to think of users of the website, but not of the number of links and their influence on promotion.
No matter how «ideal», in your opinion, the interlinking is, if people who visit the site do not use it, the interlinking will have no effect. Also there are no universal schemes of an interlinking which can be blindly followed. First of all, make sure that links are useful and they are clicked through. So concentrate your efforts on the comfort of visitors while they browse your website.
3. How to build an anchor for internal links
The more natural your anchor looks, the more chances you have to take high positions in web search engines.
We follow the following rules at creation an anchor:
- the correspondence of anchor and non-anchor links from texts of internal pages should be about 70% for 30%;
- it is necessary to avoid strongly marked commercial anchors. Blend the anchors of links with additional words, use keywords in different morphological forms;
- natural distribution of anchors in words according to the length. In a natural reference profile prevail one or two-word anchors;
- naturalness — 2-3 internal links (perhaps, with small deviations in this or that aspect) is quite enough for the text in 1500—2000 signs;
- the text near the link should naturally motivate to follow the relevant page of the website.
4. Is it necessary to attribute the Title for links? If yes, in what cases it should be done?
The main purpose of the Title attribute is to help the visitor of the website to receive more detailed description of an element. For this reason, we recommend to fill it in case when the link is non-anchor or low-informative. For example: here, on the link, on this page etc.
If the link is anchor and comprises the phrase briefly characterizing the page, there is no need to describe the link. The user already sees where he is going to follow.
For example:
Figure No. 1
Besides, the links of the page will not be ranged better from senseless repetitions of an anchor. Quite the reverse, together with other errors on the website, the repetition of a link anchor can lead, for example, to be imposed of sanction for spam.
5. Is it possible to refer on the main page by the anchor link?
You should not refer to the main page of the website by the anchor link. Links on the website usually lead to the pages where more detailed information on service or goods is shown. And such information is frequently shown on internal pages of the website. The link to the main page of the website with an anchor in the form of a key phrase can be regarded by SE as an attempt to increase the weight of the main page artificially on demand in an anchor.
Certainly, if you refer to the main page in one article, it is alright. But replication of this link in each text will negatively affect ranging of the website.
6. Are there any sanctions?
Most often sanctions are inflicted if spam in the interlinking is combined with other elements of spam, for example, reoptimization of texts, headings, metadata.
Spam elements in the interlinking serve as a signal that the spam methods of promotion are used on the website. These methods are as follows:
- surplus of key phrases in an anchor;
- the use of spam constructions in anchors;
- poor visible links that are obviously designed not for users;
- anchor links from texts of internal pages to main page;
- excessive number of internal links;
- iterative reference;
- anchor links in «cellar» of the website.
7. Majority of links lead to the restricted pages, is it bad?
The promoted pages of the website should have the largest static weight. If you direct all static weight to restricted pages, then as a result it is possible to complicate the correct ranging of the website by SE robots.
It is necessary to organize an interlinking in such a way, so that the maximum concentration of static weight was transferred to the promoted pages of the website.
8. Is it necessary to use «rel nofollow» for the interlinking?
We do not recommend to use the rel=«nofollow” attribute for the interlinking of the website. The matter is, that when calculating the PageRank, all outgoing links from the page, both with nofollow, and without it are considered. But at the same time links with nofollow do not give weight.
Matt Katts in the interview published in 2013 advised not to interfere with a PageRank transfer in the website and to allow the search robots to scan all pages.
If you do not want the page to be shown in the results of search issue, it is possible to close it from indexation in the robots.txt file or by means of meta robots noindex.
9. What is the better way to design links when transferring from http to https?
When transferring the website to the protected https, it is necessary to switch all internal links to relative ones. It is important both for correct reindexation of the website by search engines, and for the correct redirection of users.
For example, the link in a format <a href = „http://site.ru/catalog/“>
is necessary to be changed in the following way: <a href = „/catalog/“> (in relation to the domain)
or in such a way: <a href =»//site.ru/catalog/"> (in relation to the protocol)
We recommend to use relative references in relation to the protocol. Thus, regardless of whether your website is on HTTP or HTTPS, it will always refer to pages with the same protocol.
Conclusion
Everything that is created on the website, is created for visitors. It also concerns the internal links. If the link is useful — put it. It is not necessary to make references only for the sake of an interlinking or transferring of weight. The advantage is born by only those links which are followed by users.
