Internal Linking - Can You Over Do It?

[94501]

Hi,

One of the sites I'm working on has a forum with thousands of pages, amongst thousands of other pages. These pages produce lots of organic search traffic... 200,000 per month.

We're using a bit of custom code to link relevant words and phrases from various discussion threads to hopefully related discussion pages. This generates thousands of links and up to 8 in-context links per page. A page could have anywhere from 200 to 3000 words in one to 50+ comments. Generally, a page with 200 words would have fewer of these automatically generated links, just because there are fewer terms naturally on the page.

Is there any possible problem with this, including but not limited to some kind of internal anchor text spam or anything else? We do it to knit together pages for link juice and hopefully user experience... giving them another page to go to. The pages we link to are all our pages that produce or we hope to produce organic search traffic from.

Thanks! ....Darcy

[EGOL]

Here is what I do.  I have not had any problems.   These are article pages that I am talking about.

The first instance of any word or phrase for which I have an article is linked to that article.  In any given article there are at least four or five of these links to a few dozen of these links.  These links are manually placed as the article is posted.

From running CrazyEgg on my article pages, I know that these links get clicked.  Some are clicked a surprising number of times.  So, I am a strong advocate of this type of internal linking because it increases pageviews and readers must find it helpful because they are clicking these links a lot.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Great response as always!

[94501]

Hi Egol,

Thanks for the response. What do you see as the risks, if any, in our more automated approach?

Thanks... Darcy

[EGOL]

I doubt that the automated approach is a problem.

I like my approach because the anchor text will be natural language as written in the article.  This gives a diversity of potential anchor text variations.  All done naturally.

If your automated system allows you to provide multiple triggering words, then I would take every advantage of that.  For example, if you have an article about widgets, I would load a large number of variations into the program like.....

green widgets, green widget, red widgets, red widget, blue widgets, blue widget, wooden widgets, wooden widget, brass widgets, brass widget, widgets, widget to produce a huge diversity of anchor texts).

..... to produce a huge diversity of anchor texts.  Also note how "green widgets" and "green widget" are both present.  I used an automatic system in the past and both variants were needed.  Also, "widgets" and "widget" are listed at the end.  That prevents the automated system from superseding two-word variations.

[DonnaDuncan]

Good advice here. I hope you're linking out too, when it's helpful to your audience.