I'm doing quite a bit of internal linking on my new WorldPhotoSeries sites, and was wondering if there's such a thing as too much internal linking. For example, take this short write up from the following page: Canada's City that Never Sleeps What I have been doing thus far is when I come across a place or term I can internally link, I link it to that page, but only the first time it appears on the page, like this: But what I was wondering is would it be too much if I linked every time a linkable word/phrase came up like this: Thoughts? Ideas? Suggestions?
I think it would be too much if you are liking the the same pages using the same anchor text. If I were you I would try to link using 2-3 word phrases instead of only the city name. Maybe something like 'Toronto Restaurants' or 'Vancouver Vacations'...
Not sure, but hasn't it been said that the more more links you have on a page, the less important they are? I bet there is a sweet spot, but I have no idea what it is. Recently I removed a navigation menu from my website. Impressions went down, but clicks to my ads went up.
When it's applicable, I do that... like when referencing particular photos. Like if I were to mention the CN Tower in a write-up, I would link to a page with a photo of the CN Tower... but I don't think I'd want to link to the Vancouver page with the anchor text of Vancouver Restaurants, know what I mean?
Yeah... I guess that's sort of what I'm asking... most of the write-ups are in the 150-400 word range, and there wouldn't probably be more than 5-10 links per write-up, tops. But, of course, I have the navigation menu on the right as well... I'm going to keep doing it the way I'm doing it now, at least... (when I remember... hehe). Just wondering if 3 links to the same page in the same write-up is worth while, both for users and for SE's, know what I mean?
You should take aesthetics into consideration. Hyperlinking a keyword once should be enough; continually linking the keyword as it appears is just overkill and makes the post look cluttered.
That's sort of what I was thinking... but I tried it with a couple of posts, and it didn't look that bad...?
take wikipedia as an example. Look at its rampant interlinking (sometimes relevant, sometimes not) that is obviously keyword driven and not context driven. What's good for the goose....
Yeah, exactly... I want to keep the linking relevant (i.e., not link to the word "city" or something... but I don't want to go crazy, either.
I really dislike Wikipedia's linking. it's just so messy and offers too many distractions to finishing reading the article IMO.
Well, it's always possible to change the style of the anchor tags so they don't stand out as much. Perhaps make the color of the font a little different then the usual text on the page, and remove the underlining....
Re Wikipedia - I don't think it's that distracting. But their rankings are, I think, because SO MANY people use them and link to them.
I don't think that linking to a page more than once has any additional value as far as Google goes and it is distracting to the person reading it. It's better to just link to the page once (the first time the word comes Up). I use this a lot to tie together related pages in my site. Links in text have greater weight and (perhaps) passes more PR.