Internal Linking from Menu or body text or both with exact match keyword?
-
I used to have my menu link to every page with my exact match keywords.
I am a Magician and have pages for each county / town so I had a link to /magician-hampshire with the anchor text Magician Hampshire in the menu.
I recently had my website updated and the developer told me this was very spammy have a menu that said Magician Hampshire, Magician Surrey, Magician Berkshire
He suggested that I should now have a menu structure that says Areas Covered>Hampshire - Surrey - Berkshire etc.Google will know my website is about a magician and relate the two together.
Is this correct or should I revert my menu back to anchor text of Magician (County)
I am running wordpress and he said the title attribute can say Magician Hampshire but the Visible text is for the user and not Google.
I also use the technique of doing site:rogerlapin.co.uk magician hampshire and then seeing the top 10 pages google has for me and placing a text link from each of these pages in the body text.
When doing link analysis I now see I have two links to each page but understand that google will only account for the first one (from the menu)
Questions:
Should I link to every main page from the Menu with the exact anchor text?
Does google only take into account the first link to a page it discovers?
Will it associate a link to a page with just the text of the county (Berkshire) to be related to Magicians in Berkshire as that is what the page is about?A few years ago I used to have at the bottom of each page Magician Hampshire | Magician Surrey | Magician Berkshire | Magician Sussex links - and to date a a lot of other Magicians employ this same technique. I was told google would slap them for it but so far it has not and it seems to be working for them.
Many Thanks
Roger
-
Wow thanks there is some great advice here - I agree I need to be developing my website for the user but there are many of my competitors who are still employing the tactic of many links on each page to Magican + Location and seem to be outranking me.
I keep getting told by various SEO people that google will slap them down soon but it never seems to happen.
I am still trying to find the magic formula as I suppose everyone is!
Thanks
Roger
-
Areas Served vs. Magician + Location
I agree with the developer and definitely think you should move toward an areas served approach, either via the nav menu or working the areas into your home page content once (don't make it sitewide footer links that look spammy). With this approach, you're next task is to create custom local landing pages with content relative to those areas (photos, history, places you've performed, your favorite "magical" places within the towns, etc.)
I have seen some local landing pages with exact match in the Nav menu. Personally, as a web user, I'd much rather click on a town name than see a dropdown list filled with "Magician Surrey" "Magician Hampshire" that looks exactly the same, save for the location.
There are quite a few experts in this area:
Mike Ramsey: http://niftymarketing.com/optimal-local-landing-page-infographic/ Linda Buquet: http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/ and the forum here: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/ Mike Blumenthal: http://blumenthals.com/blog/The important thing to remember is take the time and effort to make these custom local landing pages UNIQUE and something a web visitor would get value from.
Exact Anchor Text in Nav Menu
Don't overdo it. Make your navigation menu links be something that your web visitor will understand without question. There may be certain times when it's okay to use exact match anchor text but do so SPARINGLY and don't sacrifice your web visitors for the sake of exact match anchor text. Adding keywords in your anchor text should make sense to your visitors.
Here's Matt Cutts answer about exact anchor text and not overdoing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ybpXU0ckKQ
I also use the technique of doing site:rogerlapin.co.uk magician hampshire and then seeing the top 10 pages google has for me and placing a text link from each of these pages in the body text.
A better technique would be paying attention to your content on your website and linking internally where it makes sense. Be careful with overloading your pages with links as well. The way I like to think of internal linking is much like you would see a newspaper or informational site providing links to give you more context about what you are reading.
Does Google only take into account the first link to a page i****t discovers? AND When doing link analysis I now see I have two links to each page but understand that google will only account for the first one (from the menu)
No. Google will crawl all internal links on a page up to a certain extent. If you have hundreds of links on a page, the crawler may abandon ship eventually and not crawl all of those links, which is why Moz and others have recommendations about the number of links on a page. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en (Keep the number of links on your page to a reasonable number.)
Link Priority:
There's a 2010 article from Rand saying that links higher up on the page are given more weight, however, it's three years old and one of the comments on that article says Matt Cutts debunked that idea, though I can't find the video. It seems like there hasn't been much conversation on first link priority since 2012. Here's another article from 2012 about internal link placement on the page: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2185977/Anatomy-of-an-Internal-LinkThere's also a video from Matt Cutt's about the history of page rank and multiple instances of the same link on the same page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYWlEItizjI
I don't have a definitive answer here as far as link priority and order on the page. Maybe you can find more resources in the Q&A on that topic, such as this one: http://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-internal-links-on-page-any-benefit-to-nofollow
Hope all of this gives you some guidance and a lot of resources
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is a link inside a video player considered an inbound link from the domain the player is embedded in?
Good afternoon...We just added a link to our homepage inside the menu of our video player. In the link below, if you click on the menu icon in the bottom right corner of the video player, you'll see a "Powered by WellcomeMat" link at the bottom of the menu. http://www.wellcomemat.com/video/kt216e25172416n/-Rancho-Santa-Fe/Ca/92067/16596-Via-Lago-Azul/1234567890/ My question for the community is would that link be considered an inbound link from any site that has the video player embedded? So hypothetically, the video player is embedded into www.abcd.com. If a user would click on that link and go to our homepage, would search engines recognize that as an inbound link from abcd.com, even though it sits within our video player? And most of the time, the player sits within an iframe. So that's why I'm not 100% sure. Thanks for reading and for your help! It's much appreciated!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brian7201 -
Seo for international sites
Hello, I have a question for the group, our main US site- http://www.datacard.com is utilized to move content to other regional sites like http://www.datacard.co.uk/ and http://www.datacard.fr/ and http://www.datacard.com.br/. Anyhow, we essentially have some regional content on those sites, but for ease of maintaining and updating the content we have a company translate this for us and then undergo an in country review for local people in our company to review the content. That being said the meta descriptions, titles, code, everything gets translated to that language. I know there are issue for SEO for these purposes as we get much better rankings with http://www.datacard.com. The regional sites are newer so this could be part of it. We don't have an agency helping us with SEo and i get a lot of questions on what can be done internally for this for regional sites with our current structure. Any tips you have? It would be greatly appreciated! Laura
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lauramrobinson320 -
Do image "lightbox" photo gallery links on a page count as links and dilute PageRank?
Hi everyone, On my site I have about 1,000 hotel listing pages, each which uses a lightbox photo gallery that displays 10-50 photos when you click on it. In the code, these photos are each surrounded with an "a href", as they rotate when you click on them. Going through my Moz analytics I see that these photos are being counted by Moz as internal links (they point to an image on the site), and Moz suggests that I reduce the number of links on these pages. I also just watched Matt Cutt's new video where he says to disregard the old "100 links max on a page" rule, yet also states that each link does divide your PageRank. Do you think that this applies to links in an image gallery? We could just switch to another viewer that doesn't use "a href" if we think this is really an issue. Is it worth the bother? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomNYC0 -
Are these URLs too Keyword-packed?
Hi guys, Here is the URL: http://www.consumerbase.com/mailing-lists/dog-stores-mailing-list.html The target keywords are "Dog stores mailing list" and "Dog stores mailing lists" Does having "mailing-list" and "mailing-lists" in my URL hurt me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Relevancy of link profile
Hi! I'm doing an audit of http://www.stevesims.com/ at the moment, who has had rankings for 'website designers' plummet recently. Looking at the site, there a few things to do with on-page and on-site optimisation, but nothing major. Instead, I think the link profile is the issue. There's a lot of site wide links from non-relevant sites, but I'm struggling to see anything else. Any thoughts would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Do 404 Pages from Broken Links Still Pass Link Equity?
Hi everyone, I've searched the Q&A section, and also Google, for about the past hour and couldn't find a clear answer on this. When inbound links point to a page that no longer exists, thus producing a 404 Error Page, is link equity/domain authority lost? We are migrating a large eCommerce website and have hundreds of pages with little to no traffic that have legacy 301 redirects pointing to their URLs. I'm trying to decide how necessary it is to keep these redirects. I'm not concerned about the page authority of the pages with little traffic...I'm concerned about overall domain authority of the site since that certainly plays a role in how the site ranks overall in Google (especially pages with no links pointing to them...perfect example is Amazon...thousands of pages with no external links that rank #1 in Google for their product name). Anyone have a clear answer? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Link to domain
Let's say i want to rank for rental car service and purchases a domain rental-car-service and creates a site http://www.rental-car-service.com There will be few persons who won't use anchor text to link to the site, but will simply link using URL ( in this case http://www.rental-car-service.com ) So, will a link to http://www.rental-car-service.com from another site using http://www.rental-car-service.com as anchor text help the keyword rental car service ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Internal Anchor Text - Partial or Exact Match Does It Matter?
When linking internally on an ecommerce site between pages and from a sitemap, is partial or exact match on the anchor text a significant factor? If it matters to Google, which is a better practice to use? I found plenty of info on external links, but precious little on internal links (which suggests it doesn't matter enough to worry about).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0