Retail Site and Internal Linking Best Practices

[Marketing.SCG]

I am in the process of recreating my company's website and, in addition to the normal retail pages, we are adding a "learn" section with user manuals, reviews, manufacturer info, etc. etc.

It's going to be a lot of content and there will be linking to these "learn" pages from both products and other "learn" pages.

I read on a SEOmoz blog post that too much internal linking with optimized anchor text can trigger down-rankings from Google as a penalty. Well, we're talking about having 6-8 links to "learn" pages from product pages and interlinking many times within the "learn" pages like Wikipedia does. And I figured they would all have optimized text because I think that is usually best for the end user (I personally like to know that I am clicking on "A Review of the Samsung XRK1234" rather than just "A Review of Televisions").

What is best practice for this? Is there a suggested limit to the number of links or how many of them should have optimized text for a retail site with thousands of products?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

[EGOL]

Well, we're talking about having 6-8 links to "learn" pages from product pages and interlinking many times within the "learn" pages like Wikipedia does.

Just opinion.... I would not worry about this if it was on my site.

[matbennett]

I'd second that. Don't worry.. just be happy that you have so much content worth internally linking to.

One heads-up (might be obvious) : Never lose site of the aim.  I'm trying to help a very content rich store deal with some conversion issues at the moment.  At some point they forgot they were a store and all traffic seemed to be funnelled towards content rather than the transactional opportunities.

[BeytzNet]

Hi Mat,

I encountered myself the same issue and wondered what you thought...

I run an e-commerce website. There was a point where I saw a keyword that is somehow related to my site but I knew that it would have low percentage to convert.

I decided to try and added an article about it. It got me on first page for two keywords (positions 3 and 7) that are exact searched about 420,000 times (which is much more than all of my main subjects together...).

The article is very good and informative - I have 80% bounce and average time on page of over 2 minutes. Meaning people are coming, reading and then most of them are leaving. By the way, I have an outgoing link there to a more related site assuming that I rather have them going out through me than back to Google.

Is that a good thing or I should stay away from these type of articles?