One SEO professional asked a question about internal links. They were curious about a tweet from John Mueller, where John said that internal linking is most important for website structure and more than URL structure.
His question is: does it make sense to examine the internal links from important pages of a website to see if they have links from other internal important pages?
Should we be doing some kind of link hygiene in the sense of removing links to less important pages, so the links to the important pages have more weight?
Also, does it make sense to calculate internal page rank?
John explained that while internal linking is something you can control, he cautions about going overboard and saying “Well, I’ll just remove links to pages I don’t think are critical.”
That’s something he believes happened when they introduced nofollow, that people would say “Oh, the Terms of Service page: I’ll just make all the links to that page nofollowed.”
But, that doesn’t change anything. It’s a lot of work. And you have to maintain it forever.
So, this is basically wasted work.
John says he would still recommend going through your website and trying to create a kind of graph of how things are linked.
He also added that most SEO tools have some compatibility for doing that, in terms of crawling the website and creating a guide to showing the site’s structure.
This happens at approximately the 51:09 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
SEO Professional 9 51:09
Thanks for having us again. My question today is about internal linking. I found an interesting tweet from you this week, which says, internal linking is most important for website structure and more than URL structure if, if I got this right.
And my practical question would be, does it make sense to look at the internal links from important pages of a website to see if they have links from internal–from other internal important pages?
And to do some kind of link hygiene in the sense of removing links to less important pages so that the links to the important pages have more weight? And does it make sense to calculate the internal PageRank, which is also possible.
John 52:13
I mean, it’s something you can do. It’s a bit tricky, because we try to be smart with how we process internal links, and especially some very common pages that get a lot of links, like an About Us page or Terms of Service.
They’re linked from across the whole website. But at the same time, we understand this is kind of a pattern that is normal. And it doesn’t mean that we should rank the Terms of Service page for anyone who’s searching for the company name. So it’s something where on the one hand, the internal linking is something that you can control.
But I wouldn’t go overboard and say, Well, I will remove links to pages that I don’t think are critical. Because that’s especially something that happened, I think, when we introduced the nofollow, that people would say, Oh, my Terms of Service, all links will be nofollow to it. And that doesn’t change anything. It’s like a lot of work.
And you have to maintain it forever. But it doesn’t change anything for your website. So it’s, it’s kind of like wasted work. But I would still recommend going through your website and trying to create a kind of a graph of how things are linked.
And I think some, or probably most SEO tools have some capability for doing that for crawling the website and creating kind of this this graph where you have like different flowers and trees or whatever, to show the structure of the website. And when you look at that, sometimes you can tell at first glance, is there a clean structure? Or is it completely messy?
And if it’s completely messy, then I think there is definitely room to clean that up and to make it clear what the structure should be. And by making a clearer structure, you are helping us to understand which pages you think are more important.
So that’s definitely something I would try to find ways to clean up. I mean, it’s not, it’s not that I’m saying like, your website will rank better if you have a clean structure. But it’s more, if we understand your website should rank in this range, which of these pages are the most important ones, and that’s something that you’re telling us there.
And that’s something that gives you value and that you’re sending people to the pages that you care about. So that’s certainly something I would look into doing. I think that’s a good use of time, especially for larger websites that have evolved over many years.
It just gets really messy organically over time and every now and then, it takes time and energy to kind of restructure things and make sure that everything is kind of well organized again, and that is something that you will see effects from.
SEO Professional 9 55:03
Okay, thanks. And what about the internal page rank, which is quite easy to calculate? Would you recommend doing something like that to see which pages do have the most importance and have the most weight from internal links? Or would you say this is something that’s not necessary?
John 55:23
I don’t know. I do it for things that I play around with. But it’s, I think it’s something for people who like to play with these things. Sure. It’s kind of interesting. But the aspect that you can’t really model in there is that individual pages will get different external links. And that essentially affects the internal page rank as well.
Like, if everyone is linking to your Terms of Service page, then suddenly it is something that has a lot of PageRank, and PageRank is something that we use in our systems, but we use lots of other things.
So it’s kind of an interesting, I don’t know, almost like a gadget from a technical point of view. But I wouldn’t see it as something that is, like, supercritical from a practical point of view.
It’s more like, Oh, you like to mess with numbers and play with graphs? Like, sure you can calculate this. I wouldn’t see it as something that is reflected one to one at Google.
SEO Professional 9 56:27
Okay. Maybe it would make more sense when calculating the internal page rank just ignoring the external links and just focusing on all the links that are within the website?
John 56:38
I mean, sure. I mean, you’re kind of modeling things for yourself. And yeah, okay. Like you can decide how you want to model that.
Okay. And also within the PageRank functions, I think there’s like a dampening factor and different other things that you can mess with. And you can play around with that. Yeah, see, like, what would that change?
And do I see anything that kind of stands out as something, an opportunity for my website. But I wouldn’t see it as this one magical tool that tells you how to rank number one.
