Doing your internal linking well has quite a few SEO benefits. Connecting related posts with each other lets Google know that you’ve created content on various aspects of a certain topic. This can make you a stronger candidate to rank for that topic. But, can internal links also be detrimental to your site? Is it possible to create too many internal links, for example by having lots of links in your navigation? That’s what this Ask Yoast is about!
Jeroen Custers of Agrifirm emailed us with a question regarding navigation links:
“We have a top menu with a sub menu on every page of our online shop and in Google Search Console I see that some pages are linked more than 15,000 times. And our homepage is linked 25,000 times. Is this a problem?”
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Navigation links and SEO
Well yes and no. If your menu structure, overall, is so big and it’s loaded in the top of your page, then that might not always be the best idea for your SEO. One of the things that we used to do in the old days – that I still like to do sometimes now – is load the menu at the bottom of the page. Why?
Because that means that you’re showing the content first and you’re showing the links in the content to Google first, and then you’re showing them the entire menu. Not even thinking about page rank, this order of things makes slightly more sense to Google. And it might also make more sense to blind people and other people that visit your website. So, if you can do that, then that would be beneficial.
Also, if your menu is too big, I don’t always really appreciate that as a customer. But that’s something that you have to test with your customers and visitors. Investigate what works best and whether your navigation menu isn’t too big and cumbersome to work with. But that’s more of a UX question, than really an SEO question.
Good luck!”
Ask Yoast
In the series Ask Yoast we answer SEO questions from followers. Need some advice about SEO? Let us help you out! Send your question to ask@yoast.com.