What's the best strategy for interlinking pages?

[mikepcservice]

Hey guys, can you share with me your Site's pages interlinking strategies please? I normally would put only one link on every page linking to another relevant page on the site. Does anyone here do it any differently?

 

[Conor Treacy]

Link anything that is relevant and helpful to the user.

If I'm talking about web design, and in the middle of it I'm talking about eCommerce Layouts, I'll link out to that page/article (whether internal or external). Then further down the page, I'm commenting on specific plugins with WooCommerce to help with abandoned cart, I'll link to that article. If I mention using Google Analytics and how to read it, then I link out to that article/video.

As long as you're being helpful to the user, and you're guiding them on a path, then link away!

Others do link wheel strategies and Silo linking, but much of those discussions revolve around affiliate sites and linking to "money pages". While it can work in practical websites too, their power of link sculpting, etc is on affiliate-type sites.

Oh, and when I say link anything that's relevant, that doesn't mean putting 50+ links on a page with only 300 words of text

 

[mikepcservice]

Thanks! When you link, which option do you choose, to open in another tab or go to another page please?

 

[Conor Treacy]

Thanks! When you link, which option do you choose, to open in another tab or go to another page please?

Internal is nearly always open in the same tab unless there's a specific reason. External sites are always open in a new tab. They can go view something, but we want the site in the background so they come back to it if needed.

 

[studentoflife]

Internal is nearly always open in the same tab unless there's a specific reason. External sites are always open in a new tab. They can go view something, but we want the site in the background so they come back to it if needed.

I always wondered about this. I constantly find links on webpages that open in the same tab, taking me elsewhere. But I wasn’t finished on that page. I always wondered why they didn’t open it in a new window. I thought maybe there was a specific reason why they didn’t do that.

 

[mikepcservice]

I have always been on the fence with this thinking might be best to let it open in another tab so the reader can easily view what's on the other page and easily get back to where he/she was on the previous page. I personally find that if opening in the same tab when I go back I have to scroll to find where I had left off on the page.

 

[Conor Treacy]

I always wondered why they didn’t open it in a new window.

Usually, it's one of three things;

• Lazy and didn't do it
• Software they used to build the site, doesn't support it
• Didn't know it was an option

It's hard to say which is more common, but laziness definitely ranks up there.

Most clients that we talk to didn't even know that opening in a new tab was an option. Whether that's something they didn't know could be done, or something that the software they used to build the site didn't support it, that's another thing.

Some of the site builders have the "open in a new tab" option hidden, or behind an expandable tab. So because it's cumbersome to get to, people just skip the step.

It's the same as linking to images - they should open in a lightbox or new window. Opening on the same page tab is old-school but people still do it today, regularly!

 

[studentoflife]

Thank you Conor, great information as always.

 

[djbaxter]

Internal is nearly always open in the same tab unless there's a specific reason. External sites are always open in a new tab. They can go view something, but we want the site in the background so they come back to it if needed.

Bear in mind that you can override the intention of the web page by your browser settings.

 

[Conor Treacy]

Bear in mind that you can override the intention of the web page by your browser settings.

Oh, very true! And in search results too. All my search results open in a new tab.

 

[mikepcservice]

Shouldn't it be best to interlink each page into the other guys. For example you have 4 pages Home, About us, Contact and Services. So on the Home page you link to the Services page, on that page you link to About page and on that page you link to Contact page then on this page you link back to Home page. This would be a continuous loop for google to crawl I am thinking.

Or would that system not give any advantage at all and main thing simply being that each page has to link to at least one of the other pages on the site?

 

[cfazio]

Watched this the other day, gave me some new ideas about interlinking. Especially using site search + a pages keyword on google, to see anywhere it appears on your site. So you can evaluate if you want to interlink it or not.



Also alot of it is context... dont just internal link something that appears randomly, google looks at the copy and images located near an internal link. So make sure it builds up relevant context to the target page around the anchor text, not just the anchor text.

I like to internal link with anchor text that is exact match to the target pages H1, which should also be the keyword you want the target page to rank for.

 

[Conor Treacy]

So on the Home page you link to the Services page, on that page you link to About page and on that page you link to Contact page then on this page you link back to Home page. This would be a continuous loop for google to crawl I am thinking.

Kinda but not really. Depending on how deep down the rabbit hole you go, you run the risk of Google stopping the crawl and never reaching the loop part. This particular method used to be effective on large affiliate-type sites and those same sites don't submit an XML sitemap as Google would pick up the pages directly from there.

For most businesses, we link all their main pages in the header and footer navigation. Usually, this is 5-10 pages. Then we get into the blog and online stores or categories etc. When you think about a store, they do more or less operate in the style of linking you're talking about.

Home > Category > Sub Category > Sub Sub Category > Product

But in each of those steps, while you're linking DOWN to the product, you're also linking BACK to the previous tier, and for extra bonus, you've got breadcrumbs enabled so a site visitor who is looking at the Product Page can simply click on Category, and be back at that top level.

I've not seen anyone show reports of "Link Sculpting" having any benefit when doing this method. It's almost like a Link Wheel, but it's internal on a single site. You can definitely find articles about link wheels and many used it prior to Penguin (2012/2013?). Besides people on Fiverr gigs and resellers, I don't know of any agency that would rely on that method for a client today.

Link, internally or externally, when you think it would be useful to the visitor. As long as that's in your head, all the other tricks fade away.

 

[djbaxter]

For a small to medium site, just make sure your main navigation bar links to all the important pages, no more than one level deep. Then you don't have to worry about googlebot going around in circles.

 

[Tony Wang]

As far as opening an external link in a new tab, in recent years it's been recommended to NOT open in a new tab. The reason is that on a phone, users easily get lost with multiple tabs, and it's not obvious that you opened a new tab. Although more recently I noticed Chrome/android shows tabs in the corner of the screen. I prefer new tabs, but I'm on my desktop 99% of the time.

 

[djbaxter]

Even on desktops, where you can prevent auto-opening in a new tab/page, you still have the option in your context menu of opening in a new tab or page.