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May
09
2008
Good and Bad Internal Linking
Written by Steve Burge   
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What are Internal Links?

Internal links to your site are the links that reside on pages that belong to your domain. So links to subdomain and subfolders also count.

Why Do This Automatically?

If you have a lot of content on your site it can be hard for search engines to work out which page is most relevant for a particular search term. You can help them by automatically linking from a keyphrase to a highly relevant page for that topic.

For example, whenever I type sh404SEF it automatically links to our review of that extension. The review is #5 on Google for the phrase "sh404SEF" even though we've written many articles about it.

Creating Automatic Internal Links with Joomla

There's a great component called "Simply Links" which allows you to create internal links across your site.

Example of Good Automatic Internal Links

Here are two newspaper sites, each with very different tactics when it comes to their links and their landing pages:

ironmanlinks

The good option.

  • Links are underlined and easy to spot.
  • Links only appear once.
  • Links are to clearly defined, specific terms.

Example of Bad Automatic Internal Links

hawkslinks

Where is this bad?

  • The links are hard to spot.
  • The same link is repeated dozens of times in the article.
  • The text of link isn't specific ... "hawks" could mean many things besides the sports team.

Different Kinds of Landing Page: #1 Information

downeylanding

The details option. This pages focuses on creating an authoritative list of all the actor's movie appearances and co-stars. They do link to some articles about his work but only lower down the page.

Different Kinds of Landing Page: #1 News

hawkslanding

The news option. All the latest news articles on the team. There's little background information aside from a small box linking to some statistics and roster details.

Analyze Your Internal Links

You can find out how many pages on your site currently link to a particular page with a query like this:

link:http://www.alledia.com/blog/joomla-urls/review-of-sh404sef-url-extension/ site:alledia.com

This tells me that about 30 pages on alledia.com link to our review of sh404SEF.


You can also head over to Google Webmaster Tools. Go to Links >> Internal Links and you'll see a list like this:

internal1

Further Reading

 

Read more articles by this author:

Comments  

 
#1 David Towers 2008-05-09 10:19
Nice article Steve. Simply Links isn't available yet for Joomla 1.5 though. Do you recommend an alternative for Joomla 1.5?
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#2 guido 2008-05-09 10:46
GWP, if you look at the developer's homepage you'll notice the 1.5 version
http://www.nekkarcity.de/opensource/simply-links-for-joomla-15.html/
it isn't multilingual yet :-(
Steve, you forgot an automatical link for Simply links!! :-)
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#3 David Towers 2008-05-09 11:05
Great find, thanks Guido!
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#4 Herbert-Jan van Dinther 2008-05-09 12:53
Very nice article steve, I especialy like the landing page items.
Now I have to go over my website to get the internal linking just a bit better and create some killer landing pages.
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#5 Brian Teeman 2008-05-09 17:45
You might be interested to know that the NY Times hand codes everything.

read an interview with Khoi Vinh, Design Director (www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/business/media/21askthetimes.html/partner/rssnyt?_r=2&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin)
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#6 Mike Law 2008-05-09 21:13
Only downside with Simply links is that if you have the keyword or phrase in a heading tag it will make it linkable, it would be nice to have it ignore heading tags.
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#7 Herbert-Jan van Dinther 2008-05-10 00:34
@Brain: They handcode the templates lyaout with html and css, the urls and internal linking is done by the C.M.S. they use. But you now that :-)

It is a great article to read about how a large website still can come up with special things to do make it more intresting for their visitors in means of spcecial layouts.
Thanks for sharing this article, its a great find.
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#8 Anne Hennegar 2008-05-10 00:34
I think some credit goes to Marshall Simmonds for the NYT success.
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#9 Kesepian 2008-05-10 03:41
I like comparisons! Nice article. :-)
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#10 Guysmiley 2008-05-10 13:45
Great article, and we've been looking at this concept for some time but struggling to create these internal links 'the old fashioned way'. 'Simply Links' is a great solution for sites on j1.0x... Is there an automated culprit for those who have faithfully lept to the 1.5x framework?
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