A few weeks back, one of our clients came to us and asked if having too many internal on-page links was bad for SEO purposes. This question raised even more questions. Does Google even count the number of internal links on a page? And if so, how many links are too many?

Last year, Google’s Matt Cutts was asked about this very scenario. According to Cutts, internal website links typically won’t hurt your website. That is, as long as it’s done organically. Cutts explains:

“My answer is typically not. Typically, internal website links will not cause you any sort of trouble. Now, the reason why I say ‘typically not’ rather than a hard ‘no’ is just because as soon as I say a hard ‘no’ there will be someone who has like five thousand links – all with the exact same anchor text on one page. But if you have a normal site, you know…a catalog site or whatever…. you’ve got breadcrumbs…you’ve got a normal template there…that’s just the way that people find their way around the site, and navigate, you should be totally fine.” (Source: WebProNews 2013)

This statement is obviously very telling. Not so much in the sense that it debunks any myths about internal linking being impacted by Penguin, but it also sheds some light onto Google’s recent views on anchor text. For years, SEO managers were creating links with industry-rich keywords in the anchor text, in hopes of increasing their page rank. Some to a fault, leading to rumors that Google was looking to de-value anchor text altogether. This statement appears to in small part, validate that rumor.

Cutts continued, “You might end up, because of breadcrumbs or the internal structured navigation, with a bunch of links that all say the same thing, that point to one page, but as long as that’s all within the same domain, just on-site links, you know, that’s the sort of thing where, because of the nature of you having a template, and you have many pages, it’s kind of expected that you’ll have a lot of links that all have that same anchor text that point to a given page.” (Source: WebProNews 2013)

From what we can gather from this statement, internal linking is completely fine, as long as it’s done organically. Every website should be making use of structured navigation options, such as menus and breadcrumbs, as they provide visitors with an easy way to click through your website. Structured navigation helps increase traditional SEO metrics like “time on site”, and “pages-per-visit”- ultimately benefiting your PageRank.

If you’re going to include a lot of internal links in your content, just be sure that you use a variety of anchor text. As Google no longer wants to see a website make use of the same keywords excessively in order to manipulate search results.

Lastly, make sure you ask yourself, “am I putting these links here as a reference for the reader, or are they here just to be crawled by search engines”? This should tell you all you need to know about whether those internal links should really be there.

You can view the full video from Matt Cutts below: