Typically Not
Matt Cutts tells us that multiple internal links with same anchor text will not harm your website’s ranking as long as you make sure that the website follows a normal and healthy structure of interlinking.
On the other hand, aggressive exact-match anchor text links will definitely hurt your rankings. As the song goes “too much of something is bad enough”. These tactics have been repeatedly frowned upon by Google, so if you think of building over 6000 internal links, think again! Doing so will render your SEO efforts meaningless.
Google Webmaster Help – Video Message by Matt Cutts
Internal links are made because of three main reasons:
1. To direct your visitors to another page of the same website, increasing user experience, page views and to encourage them to stay in your website for a longer period of time. This is important in reducing bounce rate.
2. To enhance crawlability by providing proper navigation to spiders. Some of your links may be 3 or 4 levels deep. Internal links assist the spiders in locating those pages.
3. To pass link juice (ranking power) from one page to another
Just like keyword density, there is no hard and fast rule in laying out links on your pages. The number of interlinks you can create largely depends on your website’s structure, breadcrumbs and navigation. For most websites, we can find internal links placed at the menu, sidebar (top left, top right) at the bottom of the website and in the body of the text, depending on how the web designer and seo specialist see fit.
It has been said that internal links placed inside a body (body links) are considered most valuable because they come with a relevant content. It is then very important to choose the right pages in building internal links, making sure the anchor text or phrase is being discussed within the page’s content.
Many SEO specialists tend to overlook the importance of internal linking and focus most of their time acquiring links from other websites (off page optimization). It would be wise to remember that without proper on-page optimization, a website will have a hard time getting crawled and indexed by search engine spiders.
Have you checked your internal linking structure lately? How have you improved user experience within your website? Let us know how we can help you.
