Too many links can make your page look spammy and cluttered. This can overwhelm your users and cause them to leave.
Over-linking also makes it harder for search engines to understand your site structure and the hierarchy of your pages Internal Linking Error. This means it’s harder for Google to crawl and index your site.
This can result in lower (or no) visibility in search results and a reduction in organic traffic.
How to fix it
Semrush’s Site Audit tool triggers this phone number lead issue on pages with more than 3,000 links.
So make sure to address any pages that have this issue.
And use internal links strategically and thoughtfully, thinking about what is most important to your audience.
This will help visitors and search engines better navigate your site.
Internal Linking Error #3: Redirect Chains and Loops
A redirect is a way to send website in the world of seo everything is relative visitors and search engines to a different URL or web page than the one they initially requested. It’s like diverting traffic to a new destination.
Setting up redirects from one page to another can be helpful. But when done incorrectly, it seriously harms the user experience and can negatively impact your rankings.
For example, if an internal link leads to a page that redirects to another redirect, a chain is created. Here’s what it looks like:
Long redirect chains can slow down your site and waste crawl resources, which can cause crawlability and indexability issues .
Sometimes that chain can end up looping around itself. For example, if URL X redirects to URL Y, and URL Y redirects to URL X.
This confuses search engine robots and provides a poor user experience because it does not direct to a final destination.
And you definitely don’t want to amplify those problems by including internal links to them within your content.
How to fix it
You can identify redirect chains and loops with Site Audit . Just click on the ” Issues ” tab and look for a “# redirect chains and loops” error.
Fix redirect chains by linking directly to target pages.
In redirect loops, make sure that links go directly from the home page to the destination page, without going around in circles.
Internal Linking Error #4: Incorrect Use of Temporary Redirects
Temporary redirects (such as 302 redirects ) instruct search engine robots to maintain the link value of the original page while temporarily pointing to a different one, because the original will soon be restored.
This is a short-term solution for temporary content relocation and website maintenance.
But including internal links in temporary redirects will not pass any link juice to the new page. This can hurt your page’s rankings if you use this type of redirect by mistake.
How to fix it
You can find out if you have any issues with temporary redirects in Site Audit , under the ” Issues ” tab. Just enter “temporary” in the search bar.
If you have links to temporary redirects, change them to permanent pages whenever possible.
Internal Linking Error #5: Overuse of Permanent Redirects
Permanent redirects (such as 301 and 308 permanent redirects ) tell search engines that a page has permanently moved to a new location.
They instruct search engines to remove the old page from the index. And it helps pass authority to the new page.
This is useful in many cases. For example, if you have changed the architecture of your website.
But any redirect consumes crawl budget, which is the amount of time and resources Google will spend crawling your pages before moving on.
If your crawl budget is wasted “hopping” from sault data redirect to redirect because you haven’t updated your internal links to point to the correct pages, search engine bots may stop crawling your website before reaching all of your important pages.
This can be especially problematic if you’re going to need to use a lot more redirects in the future. For example, to migrate your site.
