Dear forum members, I have a Drupal 7.x based website with a complex taxonomy enabled. When analyzing my site structure with web tools I can see that on some pages I have more than 300-400 internal links because of the tags, categories and topics for the several nodes. Does this hurt my search engine rankings (in particular on Google)? I have read that excessive internal linking could confuse the Google spiders and make it hard for them to crawl and structure the website. Do you have any experience with this? Thanks a lot for a brief feedback and your support!
I don't see why internal links would hurt you. Look at wikipedia, they have a ton of internal links on every page and they rank in the top 5 for EVERYTHING!!
Internal links can negatively affect you in two ways. If you over optimize your site, including the internal links (everyone has keyword-rich anchor text and you are adding lots of links to every page with an intent of manipulating the search rankings through that anchor text, then you could possibly get penalized by Google. However, you usually have to be pretty bad about it to get that penalty. What you're describing wouldn't cause this. The second way internal links affect your site is how they pass PageRank through the site. You can, to some extent, control the way PageRank moves through your site. I'm not recommending PageRank sculpting (because I don't think it's that effective or worth the time), but typically a site will naturally have more links to it's homepage and top level pages (top categories or sections) which gives them more PageRank and allows them to rank better than some of the other pages. It's possible that by having all these internal links going everywhere, you are spreading the PageRank all over the place and not allowing any pages to have a greater authority. All that said, it sounds like a pretty typical blog internal linking structure. I don't it will hurt you. If you are concerned about PageRank sculpting, though, you may want to nofollow some links, like tag links. Kurt Steinbrueck OurChurch.Com
no harm in internal linking, visitor spend more time on your site, so bounce rate will reduce and google find your site interesting!!