Google Discourages Using Multiple Links

Google has been dominating the search engine market since its release. It has become an everyday utility for people all over the world. Users rely on the search engine for even the most mundane tasks. To retain users in the competitive market, the tech giant updates and lets users know about trends as well as features. In the latest announcement, John Mueller of Google explains how having too many internal connections on a single page can decrease the value, and what should be done instead.

Google warns against multiple links

The aforementioned issue was discussed in a Google Meet conference on July 2, after a site owner asked if there is any risk involved with using a large number of internal links.

Internal links are vital for SEO since they inform Google about which pages on a website are the most important. Although they do not provide the same ranking signals as external links, internal connections are nonetheless important. Internal links are also used by Google to better comprehend the site's structure. A sitemap can be utilized to present the information, but a logical structure of internal connections is far more effective.

John Mueller made the following statements cautioning users:

“Yes and no. I think, in the sense that we use the internal links to better understand the structure of a page, and you can imagine the situation there if we try to understand the structure of a site, with the different pages that are out there, if all the pages are linked to all the other pages on the site, where you actually have as a complete internal link across each page, then there is no real structure there.

It’s like this one gigantic mass of pages for this site, and they are all interconnected, we can not figure out which one is the most important. We can not find out which of these are related to each other. And in such cases, having all these internal links does not make your site that much.

So no matter what PageRank, and authority, and passing things like that, you are essentially not giving a clear structure to the site. And it makes it harder for search engines to understand the context of the individual pages on your site. So that’s how I want to look at it there. ”

“And like the other question you had there, regarding internal links that do more harm than good – yes, if you dilute the value of your web structure by having so many internal links that we no longer see a structure, then do It’s harder for us to understand what you think is important on your site.

And I think giving the relative sense of importance is sometimes very valuable because it gives you a little more opportunity to fine-tune how you want to be present in the search results.

If you tell search engines quite clearly and directly, well, this is my primary page, and from there you link to different categories and the categories link to different products, then it’s much easier for us to understand that if someone is looking for this category of product, this is the page we are going to show in the search results.

While everything is cross-linked, it is as if some of these pages may be relevant. And maybe we’re sending the user to a random product instead of to your category page when you’re actually looking for a product category. ”

Summing Up

The takeaway from the above-mentioned data shared is that website owners should avoid adding various internal links and focus on creating a structure that is similar to the structure of their pages. However, if you want to add links to articles or blog posts then add contextual links to the relevant articles. As the saying goes too many cooks spoil the broth, in the same way too many internal links just ruin all the hard work. 

Author

Zainab is a content creator & a passionate blogger. She is a professional tech blogger & an avid reader by soul. She loves to explore topics related to news/technology, particularly SMS backup & restore. In her free time, she enjoys penning down her thoughts with a cup of coffee.