Optimizing internal links or over-optimizing?

[max.favilli]

For a while I hated the look of the internal links page of Google Web Master Tools account for a certain site.

With a total of 120+K pages, the top internal link was the one pointing to "FAQ". With around 1M links. That was due to the fact, on every single page, both the header and the footer where presenting 5 links to the most popular questions.

The traffic of those FAQ pages is non-existent, the anchor text is not SEO interesting, and theoretically 1M useless internal links is detrimental for page juice flow.

So I removed them. Replacing the anchor with javascript to keep the functionality. I actually left only 1 “pure” link to the FAQ page in the footer (site wide).

And overnight, the internal links page of that GWT account disappeared. Blank, no links.

Now... Mhhh... I feel like... Ops!

Yes I am getting paranoid at the idea the sudden disappearance of 1M internal links was not appreciated by google bot.

Anyone had similar experience?

Could this be seen by google bot as over-optimizing and be penalized?

Did I possibly triggered a manual review of the website removing 1M internal links? I remember Matt Cutts saying adding or removing 1M pages (pages) would trigger a flag at google spam team and lead to a manual review, but 1M internal links?

Any idea?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Let's put it this way....1. Google expects to see pages like FAQs, About Us, Contact Pages, etc have a high number of internal links.

2. The link equity "leaked" to these pages is usually negligible. Sure, there's a small amount of PageRank, but it's not really considered anything that would influence your on-page optimization.

On the other hand, if the links were in obvious places, and there were a lot of them, I might be tempted to control my link equity as well. It really all depends on where the links are placed and how prominent they are on the page. "How likely is the user to click this link?" is a good question to ask a.k.a. "reasonable surfer"

3. At the same time, Google probably doesn't care too much that you removed those links, either. Very rare that removing links is seen as over-optimization.

4. Google is getting very good at following javascript links. They many not show up in Google Webmaster Tools, but it's likely they are parsing your javascript anyway. (unsure how much link equity, if any, flows through this)

If you're concerned about it, you can simply watch your rankings, traffic, and crawl stats to monitor for problems. If there is, simply revert your actions back to the original, and hopefully everything will be good.

Best of luck with your SEO!

[max.favilli]

Hi Cyrus, thanks for your answer.

The links to the FAQ page where 1M, the second most popular had 300k. And of those 1M link half of them were placed prominently on the top navigation bar. That's why I thought they were detrimental for link equity. Do you think they are still not making much difference?

[max.favilli]

Everything went back to normality in GWT after 48 hours.