One SEO professional asked John about internal links during a hangout.
They mentioned that in a previous office hours hangout, John Mueller had said that using too many internal links on a page can dilute their value.
And perhaps Google won’t be able to understand the site structure.
Their main question: In your opinion, what’s the amount of the ideal internal links per page for e-commerce sites with millions of pages?
John explained that he doesn’t believe there is an ideal number. The part that he would watch out for is that when you crawl the website that you can still recognize that there is a structure.
So, especially with an e-commerce site that you can still recognize, “Here’s the main home page, here are the top-level categories, second-level categories,” and you can still recognize that structure.
So that’s kind of clear how the context is of individual pages.
For example, it would be problematic…well, not really problematic, but it’s harder for Google to recognize the structure if every page was linked with every other page.
And if you have millions of pages on your website, it’s not going to be the case that you have millions of links on every page.
So, from that perspective, John doesn’t see any issue with this regarding e-commerce sites.
This happens at approximately the 12:41 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
SEO Professional 4 12:41
Hi, John, good to have you here. So I’ve got three questions. The first one is about internal links. So in a previous office hour, you once said that using too many internal links on the same page can dilute their values, and maybe Google won’t be able to understand the site structure. So in your opinion, what’s the amount of an ideal internal links per page for e-commerce sites with like, maybe with millions of pages?
John 13:16
I don’t think there is an optimal number. The part that I would kind of watch out for is that when you crawl the website that you can still recognize there’s a structure. So especially with an e-commerce site that you can still recognize, here’s like, the main homepage, here is the top level categories, second level categories, you can kind of still recognize that structure.
So that it’s kind of clear how, how the context is of individual pages. So for example, it would be problematic–well, I mean, I guess, not really problematic, but it’s harder to recognize the structure if every page was linked with every other page. And if you have millions of pages on your website, it’s not going to be the case that you have millions of links on every page.
So that’s, from that point of view, I usually don’t see any issue with this with e-commerce sites. Just because, I don’t know, e-commerce CMSes tend to be set up in that way anyway. That you have different levels of categories, and then the individual product page at some point.
SEO Professional 4 14:26
Yeah, so–Oh, yeah. Like you said, we don’t have like millions of internal links on our page. But we do have some, like different types of internal links, like some category pages, also have category internal links, and also have like product product internal links, and also like some other like supplier page, like that. Yeah.
John 14:51
I mean, usually what I recommend is trying to use one of the crawlers that you can run on your own site. Something, I don’t know, like Screaming Frog or I don’t know what they’re all called. And most of these let you generate a kind of a graph of the internal linking within your website.
And it should be something where you have kind of like a clear structure there, where everything is kind of around one central point and kinda like pointing off and kind of growing, almost like I don’t know, like tree roots or something, hard to visualize without showing.
But usually, when you look at that you recognize Oh, there, there is a structure here. Whereas if it’s just a collection of dots, and everything is linked with itself, and there is no clear, visible structure, then usually that’s a sign that it’s, I don’t know, perhaps not ideal.
