Internal Links - How to Increase them, Categories not being considered as Internal Links

[Saijo.George]

You could try adding breadcrumb navigation to your pages to add some quality internal links. Another option is to cross link to your main pages from within the content where possible. Having a health amount of internal links is great and all but don't focus a lot on internal links alone, it's not something that will dramatically improve your ranking

[sidjain4you]

Thanks Saijo. This is helpful.

[sidjain4you]

We have added breadcrumbs anyway but still it does not show up.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Here's the thing: while internal links might help your PA, PA itself is a measurement of all incoming link metrics to the page, both external and internal.

Also, while internal links can help your PA score, we weight external links more, because external links tend to play a larger influence in Google's algorithm.

After the first few internal links, additional links probably won't move the needle much for you. Too many and it's easy to over-optimize. The best internal links are natural, and often located in the body of the text with anchor text that isn't forced, like in the paragraph above.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

[sidjain4you]

Cyrus: Thanks for the note.

This has definitely helped us understand and prioritize the work. We are pretty new to SEO world and learning things step by step with the help of professionals on moz like you.

Just a small question here, that when i see my external links on Alexa, it shows more than my immediate competitors, however, in the openexplorer tool, it shows that I have less number of external links.

Moreover, i am not able to identify more than 40-41 external links which are linked to any of my competitor.

Any lights on this one.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

All companies use different link indexes, so in a sense all of them are estimated to some degree. Google has the largest link index, but even then, it doesn't always "count" all the links in it's index as relevant.

Moz tries hard to include the links most likely to "count" and pass link equity. While no system is perfect, we're pretty proud of ours. Ahrefs and Majestic both have solid link indexes as well, both with their strengths and weaknesses.

I am unsure why you are not able to access more than 40-41 links for your competitors. We do limit the number of links to any given domain to 25. (meaning if Moz links to you 100 times, we'll only show you 25 of them). if you think it's another issue, feel free to give us the URL or if you'd like to keep it private you can ask the help team at help at moz.com. Hope this helps. Cheers.

[sidjain4you]

Thanks for this explanation !!! This definitely helps.

I have a followup question on the same.

On the portal - http://www.champu.in , my front home page has sitemaps listed at the bottom of the page as a link, and sitemap page further has tons of links.

Unfortunately, using the OpenExplorer tool to see the links, which sitemap page has, it only shows one link and no other links.

I am unsure if this s regarding the template I am using as I can see some other websites on same platform - zencart having links being counted by OE.

Please share some advise on this, This would be extremely helpful.

[searupert]

Have you by chance gotten this sorted out over the last several months?  I'm seeing the same issue (using a BigCommerce template), and I'm not sure whether it's a Moz reporting issue or actually an issue with how Google sees the links on my site.  Webmaster Tools shows many internal links, but Moz shows none.

Any insight you can offer would be very much appreciated.

[emerald]

I am also having the same issue. Wish there was more info on how to outdo out competitors on this particular issue. I know it's not the sole issue but we are trying to tip the balance here.

I have tried manually counting body text links manually on my site but this doesn't match moz count in any way either. I can't understand where it gets its count from. Without clearly understanding how this internal link equity count is made we can't take action to improve on it.

This has to be one of the most frustrating of all metrics in the Moz tool!

[emerald]

I would assume that any templated links won't count for internal equity passing links - for example the header, footer, sidebar, breadcrumbs and any other link lists that are repeated around the site even within body text.

I would therefore likewise assume it will only count unique/untemplate/natural looking natural links within body text (whether these be unique anchor texts, unique surrounding body text or uniquely coded possibly).

However when I compare to competitors this thesis not hold true. So it doesn't seem to work on these principles either!

[Netable.com.au]

We have a similar scenario. Many of the competitors have got more internal equity passing links and some of our clients have 0 or 1. We know that our clients have more links than these. We crawled the sites using the https://moz.com/researchtools/crawl-test and still showing same results. Any idea?