Is this type of Internal Linking Bad or Good for my Site????

[BeautyStop]

A while back we were schooled on "Link Silos" a reputable SEO source.... and one suggestion was to create links from our product pages (bottom of link silo), back up to it's higher category page. So for example...

Home > Tools > Hair Dryers > "Product"

On the subject product... we chose to link back to "Hair Dryers" and then "Andis" (that product's brand page.

You can see this at the below product page. We added the links below "Related Categories" in the product description.

http://www.beautystoponline.com/Andis-Colorwaves-Tourmaline-Hair-Dryer-Blue-Green-p/an1dry0295.htm

We are now thinking this may be just too much as there is already a "bread crumb" trail at the top of the product page. These are in essence links back up to higher categories.

Any input on these types of links would be appreciated.. Thanks!

[zigojacko]

Those links in 'Related Categories' are not required, not from an optimisation point of view nor a usability point of view - they carry no styling to make it obvious that they are links which can also flag elements when Google crawls your pages.

The 'Browse for more products in this category' section at the bottom of the page is also not required. There is uneccessary excessive use of internal linking which is likely to be considered 'over optimisation' by Google as per the latest algorithm updates.

Effective navigation is key in ecommerce websites, the main navigation and sidebar sub / layered navigation with necessary filters should be adequate in most cases. If you're only including additional linkage to try and rank pages higher for particular terms, then Google will detect this.

If your category structure goes quite deep or is relatively complex, consider including a module to display related categories in the same way you would display related products. In its current form though, it's not required, doesn't do your website any favours and will likely do more harm than good in the long run.

Consider checking our a click through overlay (Google Analytics provide one) where you can see just how many of your visitors are clicking through those links mentioned above.

Hope that helps.