Internal links effectively guide your site visitors to the most relevant webpages and eventually, the desired action. Moreover, they help the search engine quickly crawl and index your new webpages, resulting in improved site health.
However, did you know that some common internal linking mistakes for SaaS websites can actually cost you badly?
Hello, everyone.
Welcome to today’s blog, where we’ll be talking about some deadly internal linking mistakes that might drop your site’s SEO health in a way that would be harder to recover.
So, stay hooked till the end if you want to avoid them.
How Internal Linking Affects SEO?
Internal linking directly contributes to your site’s SEO health as it helps the search engine discover, crawl, & index your webpages faster.
Not just that.
Internal linking distributes link authority across your site’s webpages that establishes your site’s niche authority, improves your site structure, and enhances overall user experience.
In short, organizing your site’s webpages with an effectively managed internal linking system boosts organic traffic & creates a logical site hierarchy. This results in a better understanding of your site’s components and their interrelation for the search engine.
❎Anchor Text Mistakes: The Ultimate SEO Red Flag
Selecting the right anchor text is a crucial aspect of the entire internal linking strategy. The wrong anchor text will not only confuse your visitors and the search engine but also lead to a total disaster.
So, Here Are The Must-Avoid Anchor Text Mistakes:
✔️Selecting the same keyword as anchor texts repeatedly within the content
✔️Using the exact-match keywords as anchor texts might appear manipulative to the search engine
✔️Relying on generic anchor texts (e.g., “click more”, “read more”)
✔️Using irrelevant anchor texts that don’t align with the destination page’s content
✔️Placing internal links to random phrases at different sections of a webpage
✔️Using the raw URL as anchor texts instead on descriptive text
✔️Relying on short-tail anchor texts that fail to describe the linked page’s content
✔️Using excessively long, awkward, weird, stuffed anchor texts with no meaning
So, What to Do Instead?
Remember one thing.
Using random anchor texts here and there will only dilute your page authority. You need proper planning when selecting your anchor text for internal linking.
For the best results, opt for a diversified anchor text selection approach. Use descriptive anchor texts that sound natural, fit into the content effortlessly, & tells your visitors clearly what to expect in the linked page. Also, to avoid repetition, try using synonyms and related terms as anchor texts.
👉Watch Out for The Risks of Overusing Internal Links in An Article
Even for SEO, too many internal links are not recommended.
Let us tell you why.
The Dark Side of Too Many Internal Links
Internal links are bad for SEO when used randomly and in large numbers.
Here’s why:
✔️A high number of internal links spreads link equity too thin due to decreased page authority passed to each linked page
✔️Pages crammed with too many internal links overwhelm, distract, & confuse your visitors, leading to poor engagement and increased bounce rates
✔️Using internal links excessively (typically 100+ on a single webpage) might appear manipulative to the search engine, leading to penalties/poor rankings
✔️Too many internal links make it harder for the search engines to understand your site structure & identify the most important pages
✔️Excessive internal linking leads to inefficient crawling, indexation, and poor/delayed online visibility of your webpages
💡The Pro Solution
Our link-building experts suggest citing around 40 to 50 internal links per page and using them only when they add real value to your site visitors.
14 Other Internal Linking Mistakes That Hurt Your Site’s SEO
Apart from the two common mistakes we mentioned earlier, there are some other mistakes to beware of.
❌Ignoring Link Hierarchy
Link hierarchy refers to the strategic practice of organizing your webpages through internal linking in a way that establishes a tiered information architecture on your site. This is crucial to direct your site visitors and the search engine to a specific webpage.
Ignoring this is one of the major internal linking mistakes because when your webpages are not structured in the right way, the search engine misses out on the most authoritative “pillar” pages.
This leads to delayed webpage crawling & indexing, buried webpages, poor user navigation, & a major drop in your site’s search engine rankings.
❌Ignoring Broken Links
Broken links are usually dead links that are also known as link rot. These are primarily hyperlinks on your site that no longer work and direct your visitors to a non-existent page that says “404 Not Found.”
These types of links badly damage your site’s SEO score by wasting crawl budget. Also, it interrupts the seamless flow of link authority on the linked page, resulting in poor user experience & increased bounce rates.
❌Overuse of Permanent Redirects in Internal Linking
Permanent redirects (HTTP 301 and 308 status codes) work like “permanent address forwarding” links that tell the search engine that the URL of a specific webpage is not valid anymore and ask the browser and the search engine to redirect the intended traffic and ranking potential to a new address.
Now, using them too many times is the worst internal linking mistake that our link-building experts always warn you about. This not only creates technical inefficiencies but also gradually slows down the site’s performance.
In short, overusing permanent (301) redirects adds extra HTTP requests that increase server load, create unnecessary lags & bottlenecks, slow down page loading speed, and prevent seamless link authority distribution.
❌Not Fixing 404s and 503s
If your internal links redirect your visitors to a page that says “Not Found” (404) and “Service Unavailable” (503), fix them immediately.
These broken pathways practically drive your traffic to a dead end that negatively affects site credibility, users’ site navigation experience, and the SEO score.
❌Excessive Crawl Depth
Excessive or high click-depth occurs when the most important pages within your domain are buried too deep within the site’s architecture.
That means, if you can’t access the most important, authoritative, and high-performing pages within >= 3 to 4 clicks from the webpage, it signals a poor site structure.
It’s one of the most common internal linking mistakes because this will prevent the search engine from crawling and indexing them faster & efficiently.
Deeply buried webpages are often rarely crawled, do not contribute to your site’s higher ranking, and receive less page authority, resulting in poor website credibility.
❌Not Creating Pillar Pages
According to experts, the best way to organize your webpages is to opt for a pyramidal site structure. It features crafting a central “hub” or “pillar” page, creating other “cluster” pages on related sub-topics, & internally linking these individual “cluster” pages with the pillar pages and vice versa.
If you don’t create these “pillar’ pages, you basically prevent their page authority pass down freely to the “cluster” pages. A site without “pillar” pages is practically a disorganized one with weakened topical authority that leads to lower search engine rankings.
❌Ignoring Pages with No Inbound Internal Links
Pages with no inbound internal links are called orphan pages. Until you internally link them with the relevant pillar pages, they are basically invisible to the search engine crawlers, leading to poor indexing.
These orphan pages neither pass authority nor guide the users to the other relevant webpages. Since they are not visible to the search engine, they remain undiscoverable, leading to wasted content investment & poor online visibility.
❌Using No-Follow Attribute in Internal Links
Using the rel=”nofollow” attribute on the links is one of the biggest internal linking mistakes. There are HTML tags that tell the search engine crawlers not to crawl the destination page, pass authority, or guide the users to the linked page.
But when you add these types of internal links to your webpage content, it basically breaks the natural link equity flow throughout your site that hinders the ranking potential of the linked pages. Moreover, it might confuse the search engine crawlers, resulting in wasted ranking power & a poor user experience.
❌Redirecting Chains from Old Links
Redirected chains are created over time when you restructure your website, migrate your data transmission protocols from HTTP to HTTPS, or update your content.
For example, your visitor tries to visit a webpage in your domain called A, which has moved to a new address, page B. Now, if you set up a redirect link to page B, which was previously redirected to page C, or your visitor lands on the final page after a series of intermediate 301 or 302 redirects, this leads to a poor user experience.
Redirecting chains from old links like this leads to slow page loading time, poor link equity distribution, & wasted crawl budget.
❌Ignoring Breadcrumb Navigation
Breadcrumb navigation is typically located at the top of a webpage and works as a secondary, attribute-based, hierarchical text link trail that shows your visitors their exact location within your entire site structure.
E.g. Home >Category>Product>Detailed Pricing>Cart>Checkout
This significantly helps the search engine understand the site structure and hierarchy in a better way, optimizes the entire user experience by reducing clicks, & distributes link equity throughout your site.
Without utilizing breadcrumb navigation, your website will lack an efficient, consistent, and structured pathway, making it harder for visitors and search engines to navigate your site, leading to poor SEO health, user experience, and reduced crawl efficiency.
❌Hidden Internal Links behind JavaScript
If your internal links are not present in the initial HTML source code, the search engine is going to have a hard time discovering and crawling them.
This will lead to misinterpreted structural understanding on the part of the search engine, delayed indexing of your webpages, & poor user navigation experience.
❌Relying on Automated Internal Linking Tools
This is one of the biggest internal linking mistakes that most of us often overlook.
When you use an automated internal linking tool, you deliberately create an unnatural, spammy, and irrelevant internal link profile that will not only harm the site’s SEO score but also appear highly manipulative and suspicious to the search engine.
Moreover, automated internal linking tools over-optimize anchor texts, lack contextual understanding, and place excessive internal links that dilute link equity. For effective internal linking, you need the right strategy and a human-driven approach that automated tools can never help you with.
❌Not Updating Old Content with New Contextual Links
The purpose of internal linking is to make sure that the new “cluster” pages you publish get the page authority from the “pillar” pages.
However, when you don’t add the links to these cluster pages in the older, relevant pages, and vice versa, you prevent the new content page from gaining authority.
This leads to reduced crawl efficiency, negatively affects user navigation experience, and leaves the site structure unorganized, leading to poor SEO health of the website.
❌Ignoring Regular Internal Link Profile Audit
This does not require an explanation because what could be a greater internal linking mistake than this!
Just as your body needs a routine checkup, your website’s internal link profile also needs a regular audit to make sure the structure is relevant, hierarchical, good enough to discover, crawl, & index the webpages faster, free of broken links, and effective enough to distribute link authority across the site.
Without a regular internal link audit, you will fail to identify the irrelevant links, keyword-stuffed anchors, keep an eye on the broken links/redirects, and fix them on time, leading to poor user experience and regular crawling.
Need Help with Your Internal Linking?
If you still can’t figure out how to start internal linking, if all these sound too overwhelming to even try out, or if you don’t want to make the same internal linking mistakes, even by chance, then trust our experts.
We have trained and dedicated link-building specialists with 7+ years of experience in fixing site structure, ensuring seamless link equity distribution across sites, and optimizing your anchor texts as well as the internal link profile.
We’ve worked with 750+ global business owners and effectively mapped their internal linking strategies, eliminated orphan pages, & performed regular internal link profile audits that ensured higher site rankings, better user engagement, and faster webpage indexation on their website.
That’s it for today.
We hope you enjoyed reading the blog.
Make sure you get in touch with our experts if you have any doubts.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1. Can you boost page rank by linking to internal pages?
Ans: Yes. Through strategic internal linking, we can help you boost your search engine rankings. This is one of the proven ways to distribute link authority from the top-performing pages to the low-performing ones, ensuring better crawlability, indexing, and improved user navigation.
Q2. Why avoid internal links with dynamic URL parameters?
Ans: Dynamic URLs create multiple unnecessary versions of your same webpage that might confide the search engine and the visitors, dilute link equity, and make it harder for Google to crawl, index, and get your webpages ranked on the SERPs. That’s why it is better to avoid internal links with dynamic URL parameters such as ?id=123, ?sort=price, &sessionid=.
Q3. Why prevent duplicate anchor usage for internal links?
Ans: Duplicate anchor usage might dilute link authority, confuse the search engine and your visitors, and negatively impact the search engine rankings. So, it’s better not to use duplicate anchor usage for internal links.
