Can You Hurt Your Rankings By Using Too Many Internal Links?

Aug 17, 2010 - 9:30 am 12 by
Filed Under Link Building

A WebmasterWorld thread has one SEO/Webmaster claiming his ranking for his primary keywords died after using too many internal links in an effort to boost those keyword rankings.

In short, he noticed he was ranking semi-well for a number of keywords. To boost that ranking a bit, he decided to add a blogroll like navigation to his site and place those keywords in anchor text to the internal destination pages. He said, it backfired and now his keyword rankings for those queries have dropped.

He said:

I made an assumption that some good internal linking using the keyword in the anchor text in the same site would push the rankings up to page 1

In effect i used the "Blogroll" style links in WordPress so i had a top 10 searched area listing these 10 keyword rich links on the right column of EVERY page

Since then my traffic overall on the site has gone down. Its almost a month since this change.

Do you think over linking internally can hurt you? Take our poll:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
- YouTube
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: September 17, 2025

Sep 17, 2025 - 10:00 am
Google

Google Discover Tests Showing X Posts From Just Your Followers?

Sep 17, 2025 - 7:51 am
Other Search Engines

OpenAI Updates Search In ChatGPT: Factuality, Shopping & Formatting

Sep 17, 2025 - 7:41 am
Google

Google: Searchers Want AI Summaries Over Links

Sep 17, 2025 - 7:31 am
Google Maps

Google Business API Q&A Feature Going Away November 3 (Changes Coming?)

Sep 17, 2025 - 7:21 am
Google Ads

New Google Merchant Center Suspension Video Verification

Sep 17, 2025 - 7:11 am
 
Previous Story: Google Images Serves Up One Image For Limited Time