As an internal linking software provider, we at Twylu have first-hand experience with the most common mistakes that website owners make regarding internal linking. Twylu helps site owners identify these types of internal linking issues and fix them.
One major trending issue that we have seen with many sites is that a lot of SEOs start building internal links without going through the necessary steps to first audit and analyze the site for internal linking.
One other major mistake is the use of automated internal linking plugins, especially the free ones or the free plan of the premium ones with limited features, which can lead to issues like duplicate links, excessive links, over-optimization, etc.
Thinking that internal link optimization is just a small item in their overall on-page optimization to do list that can easily be checked off by just simply installing a plugin. However, it ends up creating more issues than the site had before using such automated plugins.
Here is a list of the most common internal link issues we have seen websites making when it comes to internal linking optimizations:
- Linking to the same destination page twice from a single page
- Linking to two different destination pages with the exact same anchor text
- Overlinking, putting too many internal links on a single page
- Not spacing out your links throughout the textual content
- Adding nofollow to the internal links
- Linking to the non-existent pages (broken pages) or pages with redirects
- Using very long anchor text
- Over-optimizing your anchor text
- Use of the generic anchor text, like click here, this guide, this link, download, etc.
- Using only none branded terms as anchor text
- Jumping into building internal links without running an analysis first
- Random internal linking without considering the site’s topic clusters, without first identifying key pages and power pages
- Linking to irrelevant pages
- Building too many links for a destination page from different pages of the site (pages with excessive internal links)
- Building too few links for important pages or leaving some pages orphaned
You can easily avoid making these mistakes by following a solid internal linking strategy and using an internal linking software such as Twylu to audit and analyze your internal linking structure before starting to create any new internal links.
