How to make an internal page. How to do good internal linking. Which internal linking option to choose

Correct linking on the site is one of important points internal optimization. It is not needed to distribute weight between pages, as one might believe in the old fashioned way. These are the paths the user takes through the site. And you should lay them in such a way that he will definitely come to the completion of the target action. How to do this, we tell in a new post.

What is relinking and why is it needed

Linking is the "stitching" of site pages using links.

Linking can be internal and external.

Internal linking- This is the arrangement of links within the same site.

Tasks of internal linking:

improvement (the site becomes convenient and understandable);
pages (search engines better understand the structure of the site - which pages lead where, which of them are more important);
increasing the relevance of pages (due to the use of different keywords search engines better understand what queries to rank a page in the search for).

Due to the correct internal linking, it is possible:

improve behavioral indicators (increase the time spent on the site, browsing depth, reduce bounces) and, consequently, “pull up” positions in the search;
increase the level of conversion on the site (purchases, requests, subscriptions, etc.).

External linking- this is the placement of links from your own site to other sites (sites, social network pages, directories, etc.). Don't confuse external linking with . When they talk about external linking, they mean outgoing links, and by link building they mean building up incoming link mass.

Tasks of external linking:

providing users with access to useful information posted on external resources;
indication of the primary source of data (for example, when quoting or translating);
traffic redirection to partner and affiliate resources.

External links are useful for visitors because they do not need to perform additional manipulations to go to third-party resources. Moreover, search engines increase the ranking of sites that link to authoritative sites.

How to do internal linking

You can find many different linking schemes on the web - “ring”, “star”, “herringbone”, etc. In 2018, linking is based not on conditional figures, but on the benefit for visitors and, ultimately, the owner of the resource (after all user actions should lead to a conversion).

Collection of data for linking

If your site has been working for some time and has collected enough statistics, information about clicks on links can be obtained using the Link Map tool in Yandex.Metrica. You'll see which links are being clicked on the most, and you'll be able to spot patterns.

Fragment "Link Maps" Yandex.Metrica

But if the site is new, "Link Map" will not provide information. In this case, use Yandex and Google search suggestions, which are formed based on user needs.

Let's look at an example. Let's say you have an online hardware store. You want to place quick links to popular models from the Smartphones catalog page. To do this, enter the phrase in Yandex "buy a smartphone" and get a list of hints. Users who want to buy a smartphone are likely to be interested in cheap smartphones, Samsung smartphones and Xiaomi, popular models and novelties.

We write out all the “wishes” and, in fact, we get a list of pages that are worth referring to and that some users will definitely go to. Even if they don’t buy the product, you will receive, which means that the position of the site will grow.

Collecting hints manually is laborious. To simplify and speed up the work, you can use the "" tool in SeoPult. Specify the list of key phrases, select search engines (Yandex and/or Google), region, rules and collection depth (maximum - up to 3 levels) and click the "Start verification" button.

The finished result can be downloaded in XLSX format.

The final report looks like this:

The report contains enough information to understand the needs of users and make high-quality linking.

Apart from search suggestions you can use similar queries for linking, which are displayed under the search results.

The same queries are available in the Yandex.Wordstat service (right column):

To collect similar queries, another SeoPult tool is suitable - “ Collecting association phrases». It works similarly to the tool for collecting search hints discussed above.

Why did we dwell on the collection of phrases in such detail? The fact is that without understanding the needs of users, work on linking does not make sense. If you place links at random, chaotically, or, conversely, “circle”, there will be no targeted transitions on them.

Methods of internal linking

You can set up relinking on the site different ways- Below are typical examples of placing links between the pages of the site.

Main menu

These are end-to-end links that are contained on all pages of the site. The horizontal menu usually links to the page "About us", "", "Terms of payment and delivery", etc. It is not recommended to link to the main page, since it is usually linked from the logo and / or site header.

The link to the current page should not be active (for example, if you went to the "Contacts" page, then when you click on the "Contacts" menu item, the page should not reload). In addition, do not use more than 7 links in the menu, otherwise the perception of information may deteriorate.

Product menu (catalog menu, categories menu)

Two kinds of menu

When placing links in the product menu, pay attention to the following points:

take into account only the most popular search queries (for example, hallways can be brown, light, orange, and whatever, but you have determined that users are most interested in white, black and black and white - these are the colors that should be indicated in the menu. If you specify too many links, the site will be inconvenient to use, which will lead to a deterioration in behavioral factors);
in the names of sub-items, avoid spam (for example, in the item "Hallways" you do not need to name the sub-items "Modular hallways", "Small hallways", etc. To understand the essence, it is enough to indicate only a descriptive characteristic - "Modular", "Small". Users and so they will understand that we are talking about hallways);
add pictures to the section names (this move will help improve the visual perception of the site. In no case do not replace the text with pictures - the names of the items and sub-items should be in the form of text understandable for search engines).

Updated : entrust all work on internal optimization and website promotion to specialists. All tools are in one place. Campaign launch - in three clicks. Automatic budget calculation. Installment!

As a rule, recommendation blocks are used in . Here you can display similar products (smartphone 1, smartphone 2, …), related products (headphones, Charger, …) or popular products from different categories. Don't draw complementary positions chaotically without any logic - this will not give the desired result.

Products can also be offered based on browsing history - in this case, the likelihood of clicking on links increases.

Reference links can also be placed on the catalog section page to clarify the user's request. For example, those who are in the "Tables" category can be offered to go to the "Dining tables", "Computer tables", "Chairs" subcategories. Again, this technique will allow you to unload the complex and voluminous catalog menu in the left sidebar.

For information sites, recommendation blocks look different: here it is important to involve users in viewing new pages with content. Therefore, blocks with interesting posts, latest news, the most popular pages, the most commented articles, etc. are used.

tagging

Each product can be described by different parameters that cannot be included in the menu. For example, a wardrobe can be brown, made of chipboard, 100 cm wide, 50 cm deep. In order to simplify the search for products and site navigation, tags are used - links to specially created pages that group products of a given category.

You might object that all this can be taken into account in the filters. Yes, it can and should be done - put all possible search characteristics into filters. However, the filtering results are not indexed by the search robot, so the most popular queries should be separated into separate ones and referred to using tags.

Example of tags on a category page

Tags are also suitable for informational sites - with their help, similar articles are linked. Tag only those requests that are most popular (see above how to determine the demand). Otherwise, you risk visually making the page heavier. Keep a balance.

Contextual linking

These links are placed in the descriptive part of the page (for example, in an article) and lead to other pages of the site. Such links are rarely used in product cards, as they take users away from them. But on the main page and in the categories they are quite appropriate. For example, in the "Laptops" category, you can send users to an article with useful information about how to choose a laptop.

Linking directory section with info pages

If your store website has an information section, contextual links inscribed in the text help redirect traffic to commercial pages, for example, to product cards, and .

Contextual linking of an article with catalog sections and product cards

You can also link different articles to each other (we use this technique in the posts of this blog), but it is important that they are related thematically and complement each other.

Navigation chains ("breadcrumbs")

Be sure to use this linking method on all pages so that the visitor understands where he is and can return to the previous stage at any time.

It is better to use verbose chains that show the entire path to the current page, rather than abbreviated ones (where only the first page and the "Back" link are indicated). Read more about making breadcrumbs in our newsletter.

HTML sitemap

This is a separate page that contains links to all pages of the site. It helps to understand its structure. This is useful both for users and for improving the indexing of pages by search engines. See instructions for creating a sitemap.

Here are some tips to keep in mind when linking:

use only dofollow links;
do not adjust linking to any rules - use the principle of common sense and benefit for visitors;
it is not recommended to make excessive linking from product cards (for example, to pages about delivery and payment), this can lead the user away from the goal; place all the necessary service information right there in the card in a short form;
avoid (when the page links to itself);
do not put too many links from one page (only the most relevant ones);
do not link often from internal pages to the main one;
pages that are linked from the main page are indexed faster;
regularly check the site for broken links (that lead to pages with a code other than 200) and remove them.

How to do external linking

Many webmasters are afraid to link to external resources, citing the fact that the “weight” of pages flows through external links and this negatively affects ranking. Indeed, it used to be so. But in the yard of 2018 - search engines work on the basis of artificial intelligence, and for them, user satisfaction comes first.

For example, in the current article, when Yandex.Wordstat is mentioned, we put an outgoing external link. As a result, you do not need to go to the search engine, enter "Yandex.Wordstat" and click on the link in the search - you go to this service directly from the article. It's comfortable? Yes. If you are interested in an article, you open Wordstat, go between pages, test the technique described in the article and read it further. And nothing on this link "leaks", but the behavioral factors, on the contrary, are improving.

Despite the obvious benefits of outgoing inbound links, they need to be set correctly. Here are the basic rules:

each external link must be relevant, organically fit into the context (otherwise, search engines may consider that the link is placed on a paid basis and apply sanctions);
if you are not sure about the reliability of the site you are referring to, add to the link - in this case, search engines will not index it, but users will be able to follow it;
do not mask links with scripts;
make links clearly distinguishable from the body text;
use natural anchors (brand names, site URLs, index anchors - "link", "here", "instruction", "website", "useful resource");
avoid anchors with a clear commercial coloring (with the words "buy", "order", "price");
use surrounding text to let users know that after clicking on the link they will be redirected to an external resource;
be sure to set the opening of external links in a new window - otherwise, behavioral indicators will suffer.

If you follow these tips, outbound links from your site will only work in a plus.

Relinking a website is not an easy task.

To solve this problem, you will need to analyze requests, study the behavior of site visitors, determine which pages and how will be linked to each other. If you find it difficult to do it yourself, you can enlist support

Step 1
To get started, go to your group and in the "Latest News" block (in this case, I renamed it to "Menu"), click the "Edit" link that appears on hover. Important! First, you must have an Open group, not a Page. Since there is simply no such item on the Page. And second, in the menu Community Management > Information > Content, the item "Public" must be selected.

Step 2
In the "Editing" tab, we write the phrase [[Web design theory]], enclosed in double square brackets. Then click on the "Save page" button.

Step 3
After that, a “Preview” link will appear next to the button, and click on it. Below, a preview of our menu will open, where we see the link “Web Design Theory” that appears from the bottom.

Step 4
Click on this link and go to the created page called "Web Design Theory". Then click on the "Fill content" link. Next, edit the text as usual. text editor- insert pictures, texts, videos and other objects. In this case, our created page will have a URL like https://vk.com/page-15865937_43819846.

Alternative way to create an internal page
There is alternative way page creation. Basically it is suitable for public ( public pages), since the method described above is not suitable for them. For this we will use the following code
http://vk.com/pages?oid=-XXX&p=Page_name
where instead of XXX we will substitute the id of our group, and instead of the text “Page name” we will write the Menu. Now we need to find out the group id. How to do it? We go to the main page of the group and look at our posts on the wall - right under the "Add post" block it will say "All posts" - click on this link.

Go to the page and see the url like this https://vk.com/wall-78320145?own=1, where the numbers are 78320145 in this example and there is a group id. We substitute our data in the source code and get a record like this: http://vk.com/pages?oid=-78320145&p=Menu(with your numbers!). Paste this line into the address bar of your browser and press Enter. This is how we created new page In contact with.

Dmitry Skalubo

This article will be useful primarily to those who do not yet have a site. If you already have a website, you may find a few ideas to improve the existing structure, or to create new sections.

Here are my observations on own experience work with external and internal links. Only what personally worked for me badly or well on several dozen diverse projects:

For a new project, it makes little sense to wait for traffic from Google without links and clicks on them (from websites, social networks, forums, etc.) for the first 3-6 months. If your audience is Google users, you will have to learn how to work with external links one way or another.
Internal linking is needed primarily to solve the user's problem, and not to be able to cram the desired query into the anchor of the link.
A link that users regularly click on works much better than one that is just there somewhere.
All other things being equal (if two pages are very similar in content, site trust, behavioral factors, etc.), the linked page will be higher.
Great content will not go unnoticed - it will be linked without you.
Increasing positions and traffic with internal links is sometimes faster than creating new content. Yandex and Google love links.

The filter of the site or its ban in search engines also comes most quickly because of the links. Including for the abuse of internal linking, since it is easy for the site owner to influence it.

On the importance of internal linking

Over the past few years, the importance of links has been declining. No offense to the patriots, but the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet essentially copies the English-language Internet in development with a delay of 3–5 years. In MOZ data from three years ago, the first 2 places are occupied by links:

Here lies the most common mistake- in the West, the process of working with external links is called "link building", that is, creating links to the site, building links. Not a purchase, but primarily work with thematic sites, their authors, forums and other things. Creation the best content that will be shared.

And in the West, this is how it works - if your target audience uses Google (for example, these are US residents), you need to understand that with a probability close to 100% you will NOT promote the project without working with external links. Not buying them, but thus doing “link building”, analyzing competitors, working with other sites and their audience.

For Russian-language projects targeted at Russian residents, in the first year of the project’s life, from 50 to 95 percent of visitors come from Yandex, and we still have a shortage of high-quality Russian-language content, that is, first of all, we work with those factors that are in the study MOZ are in 3-5 places. These are factors related to the quality of a particular page of the site:

To what extent the content of the page matches the user's query. The quality of the content on the page, the convenience of its consumption, how much it solves the problem of the visitor.
The volume of content, its readability (markup), uniqueness, page loading speed, additional "features" like micro-markup, https protocol, correct display on the user's device.
User engagement, behavioral factors. This is the click-through rate of the page and the domain at different positions of the issue, the percentage of bounces, the depth of the site view, the time on the site.

And with the help of internal linking, you can influence all 3 factors. Now let's look at examples. Here is a very well done one:

What's good about this example:

The block with an internal link is placed as it should be - this is useful additional information for the user.
The link is contrasting and noticeable, the request of the promoted page is organically entered into the anchor.
Good readability, it is clear what the user will see when they follow the link.
You can enter from one to 10 words into the linking block, which does not stand out from the topic of the page, which will give additional traffic for low-frequency and low-competitive queries to the current page. An attentive reader will find in the first example several non-random matches with Yandex data:

In fact, such an internal linking block does not contradict any of the 3 points that relate to the concept of a quality page. The link block complements the content of the page, increases its volume and readability, increases the chance that the user will stay on the site to learn more about balcony insulation.

What, in my opinion, can be done better - since this block already exists, it was possible to refer to other pages that invite the user closer to signing the contract - terms, guarantees, prices. Here is another example:

What is good in the second example:

Prices are indicated.
Links are divided into groups.
A separate block of advantages of ordering in this company.

What is not very good is that it is a cross-cutting block, i.e. it is the same on many other pages. Such a block copes with the SEO component (transferring weights to important pages). And the disadvantage is that on the page about balconies there are 3 links exclusively about windows, they do not carry any added value and the user most likely does not need them.

A few more reasons to set up competent linking

For large projects, link blocks are one of the ways to quickly index website pages. The most understandable (although not entirely correct) example is news sites, it is critical for them that all news gets into the search results as early as possible. Specifically for news sites, it is also important to add the site to Yandex.News and Google News, since, first of all, the news output is generated based on RSS feeds. This is how it looks like:

Such issuance is formed precisely by sending data to Yandex.News and Google News. And here is how linking is used on a news site:

Such blocks on any site will speed up the entry of new pages into search results. A word of advice - new pages in niches with empty search results give the first visitors a few days after publication.

The main advantage of internal linking is not in SEO. The main advantage is the correct alignment of user paths on the site and, as a result, an increase in conversion. The most "fat" example from personal experience:

The site has a section with reference information.
After 3–4 months, the attendance of the help section from the search exceeded the attendance of the main selling pages of the site several times.
Over the next 4 months, experiments were carried out on placing blocks of links to selling pages on the reference pages.
Selling pages in the search grew by 25–30% on average for the main queries (SEO effect, which, however, could also be the result of other work on the site).
From 5 to 11 percent of those who went to the selling page through the links in the link blocks ordered the product (on average, about 8% conversion). While the average conversion of selling pages across all traffic sources, including search, was rarely above 3%.

That is, simply due to the fact that links of the form “And you can see the price and buy here” were placed on all the information pages of the site - there were from 30 to 50 new hits per month.

I conducted similar experiments on different projects, on different topics. In financial terms, linking gave clear and measurable financial results that are very easy to measure:

In the linking block, a UTM tag was "sewn" into the link indicating which page the click was from.
In the analytics system, for the purity of statistics, data is taken, where the site entry pages are pages that have a link block.
Tags are considered site visitors who have become customers (to do this, you need to set up goals in Yandex.Metrica or Google Analytics).

More clearly:

This method is available for any CMS and even for a small site running on HTML files. The disadvantage of this method is only one - you will not have quick access to transparent statistics for each link, if you have not configured the connection of statistics systems and the application accounting program.

A more advanced level is to set up a link module for your CMS, which allows you to:

Insert code on several pages at once (first you place the places in the code of the pages where the links will be located, and then in 1 click put the desired block on any number of pages).
Automatically count the number of clicks on links (allows you to select the most clickable blocks).
Conduct A / B tests automatically (if you are satisfied with the current click-through and conversion rates of option A, do not change all the blocks, but show option B to a given percentage of visitors).
Show link blocks designed for the user's device (depending on the OS used and the screen resolution, a block adapted for this device is shown).

If the site engine you are using does not have such modules, most likely you will have to master one of the TDS (Traffic Delivery System) systems. TDS - traffic distribution systems, allow you to replace the page code with a given one, depending on dozens of parameters - by display resolution, by OS, by keyword, by geolocation, etc.

The introduction turned out to be quite voluminous, so once again briefly about the important:

Previously, the number of inbound links to a site and to a particular page was more important than content quality and behavioral factors. Now (at least for Yandex), even a site with zero links can get visitors if the page is of high quality.
Without external links in Google, it is difficult to get traffic. In many commercial topics in the top 10 are old, inconvenient, but full of links sites.
"Yandex" in commercial topics also takes into account links.
For the purchase of links, you can get a filter in both Google and Yandex. A good buying link is one that you yourself would not think that it was bought.
Internal linking works well for SEO, but it is more justified for large projects where there is where and where to put links.
With the help of internal linking, you can improve the donor page on your site and get the desired anchor to another page.
Internal linking allows you to "hook" the user and redirect him to the landing page.
Internal links from visited pages of the site to new ones accelerate their entry into the search results.
Linking with an emphasis on marketing, not SEO, can be calculated very accurately - in earned money.
You need to deal with internal linking with a scientific approach - count everything and everything, experiment.
Do not reinvent the wheel - most likely, there is already a module for the site engine for your needs, or one of the TDS systems will suit you.

Site structure. Why force in SILO and where did this term come from?

For myself, I first discovered the term “SILO” by reading (you can do this too, there is a volume of about 30–35 book pages). The basic idea is simple:

Grouping site pages into thematic sections allows search engines to more accurately determine the subject of pages in these groups and the subject of the site as a whole. The optimizer, on the other hand, can selectively “strengthen” some pages in groups using internal links.

The literal translation of "SILO" (bunker) was not used by Russian-speaking SEO specialists. The terms “cluster”, “group of pages”, “category” are commonly used.

Now there are 2 most common approaches when designing a website architecture. “Website architecture” sounds abstruse and immediately seems that it is very difficult. To put it simply, this is what pages on the site to make and why, how to group them.

Website structure for SEO

The first approach is to collect as many user queries as possible and distribute them across the pages of the site according to the principle of semantic relevance. That is, queries are grouped by text match. It looks something like this:

With this approach:

All possible requests in the niche of the site are collected, non-target ones are removed (other cities / countries, not suitable for the type of goods or services, for the price, and so on).
Requests are divided into groups by text (and partially) by logical match. The quality of the breakdown depends on how well the performer understands the niche of the site. If it doesn’t understand well, you can see requests for different target audiences on the landing page, for example, “cheap” and “premium”.
From the list of pages, the structure of the site is outlined. Very often - the main 10-20 pages have some kind of coherent structure, and the rest of the pages are simply published in the section "Information", "Useful materials" or similar.
These pages are placed on the site, after which the promotion is reduced to buying links and rarely adding new pages.

The first disadvantage of this approach is that most often new groups of requests are not collected. The site stops in development at the stage at which it was created.

The second drawback is that internal linking is done according to one of the schemes found on the Internet:

If the site does not have a clear logical structure, it is very difficult to do normal linking in it.

If all the pages on the site are piled together, search engines cannot determine the subject of a section of the site or a group of pages. Small (100–1000 pages) sites outperform giants like “a site about everything” in the search results, including due to the narrow specialization of the site or its section.

The third disadvantage of such a scheme is the very quality of the pages, but this is the topic of a separate article. In short, in most cases it is impossible to take and make a page that will qualitatively answer 40-50 requests, especially if some of them are commercial, and some are informational.

How do search engines determine the structure of a site?

Search engines can determine the theme of a single page on a site. And they can quickly and correctly determine the structure of the site if the pages are divided into sections of the site physically or logically. Physical Separation:

That is, in the browser, the URL structure looks something like this:

site-name/legkovie/diametr
site-name /legkovie/marka-avto
site-name /legkovie/brand
site-name /legkovie/season
site-name /legkovie/season/letnie
site-name /legkovie/season/zimnie

With such a site structure, search engines are well aware of which pages more accurately respond to the user's query. And you will get more or less correct linking within one group of pages automatically. The most important pages will go to the main or additional menu, the nesting of pages will be indicated by “breadcrumbs” - navigation through the sections of the site and their hierarchy. Here is an example:

In this case, all pages of one group link to parent pages, child pages, neighboring groups. It is generally easier for the search engine to understand what a section of the site is about. The site receives traffic:

For narrow requests (for example, "buy asus laptop model X") - on the page of product cards;
For broader queries ("buy an asus laptop") - to the category page;
For competitive high-frequency queries ("buy a laptop") - to the "Laptops" page.

At the same time, it is enough just to “pump up” the necessary pages with internal links - for example, by placing the block “top sales”, “best by rating” or similar with links to the necessary pages in the category. This doesn't just apply to online stores. Here's from another thread:

Together they form a cluster. For general queries, the entire catalog is shown in the search results, for narrower queries, the corresponding cluster page. As you understand, the more niches a site unites, the more clusters it can accommodate.

The logical division of the site structure differs only in that the URL structure is not set by the site engine, and the search engines determine the connectivity of pages by their relinking. All pages of a site can have the same level of nesting, for example:

site-name/page1 site-name /page2
site-name /pageN
…
site-name /pageN+1000

In this case, search engines are more likely to determine the most significant pages by internal linking. These will be pages from the main menu (since it is present on all pages of the site), as well as pages with the maximum number internal links.

Clusters will also be determined by internal links. For example, 100 pages of the site link to each other, and all of them link to the 101st page, and the text on these pages has common semantics (for example, “project”, “house”, “bar”, “price”). Search engines will determine that these are pages of the same section. But it is more difficult to organize the correct link structure on such a site, and it will not be possible to do basic linking within clusters 100% automatically, you will need to think through and write down the rules for each group of pages. What it looks like:

From the link structure, search engines understand that pages 2, 3, 4 and 10 are pages of the same group, and that 10 is the main page of the group (since everyone else links to it).

The main inconvenience of such a site scheme is the difficulty in building the site structure due to relinking. Here's what John Mueller, Google Webmaster Specialist, has to say about this:

And changing the structure of the site can take time and not bear fruit. So if you don't have an obvious confusion with the structure, it's better to just keep working.

Website structure for people

When creating a site structure “for SEO”, all possible user requests are found and page groups are created for these requests. When creating a site for people, the situation is reversed. A site structure is created that closes all possible requests from users, and when created, these pages are optimized, including for requests from search engine statistics.

The main advantages of this approach:

The site will have more pages, due to understanding the needs target audience.
Pages will be interconnected primarily not by semantics, but by user needs. This makes it possible to bring the visitor to the site at any stage, from choosing a product/service to choosing where to buy.
Due to the connectivity of pages, behavioral factors on the site are better - more depth of browsing, time on the site.

Let's take several different commercial niches and analyze clearly how the site structure for people will allow you to kill two birds with one stone - to get the correct internal linking and excellent behavioral factors. Niches:

1. Construction of houses from a bar

As an example, let's take one narrow group of clients' interests - houses made of timber with an attic. In the best case, with an SEO approach, from 1 to 5 pages will be created on the site (projects, photos, reviews, finished objects).

But such a group of pages on the site can be made if you think about the needs of the user:

Here you can also add different foundations, roofing, quadrature, geometry (6 x 6, 8 x 8, 10 x 10), the presence of a terrace and another 30-50 options. With this approach, the number of relevant internal links between these pages will be in the tens or hundreds, it would be something to show on them. Such a group of pages will collect traffic for hundreds of requests - from low-frequency to high-frequency. And if you need to “pour” weight onto one of the pages for SEO purposes, you can do it, it will be enough to add link blocks to the donor pages.

In addition to internal links, the conversion on these pages will be higher, tested in different niches.

And when creating such groups of pages, ideas for creating new content will snowball. For example:

Differences between glued and profiled timber, advantages and disadvantages.
What type of foundation can be used in the construction of a two-story house from a bar.
What is included in the construction of a turnkey log house.

2. Online store of construction products

If you take a step away from the catalog structure of almost any online store that sells materials for construction and repair, a lot of ideas will open up that have not yet been really implemented. At best, to help customers and to increase the average check, blocks “buy with this product” are used.

At the same time, GOSTs, SNIPs, and regulatory documentation are completely ignored. Everyone who started the repair will remember the repeated trips and trips to "buy this or that." This is an almost inevitable step, even with a well-designed estimate. And to get internal links you can use:

Technological maps for work with a list of tools and materials. For example, from the technological map for laying laminate, you can get links to materials, to the tools used, to pages of laminate categories by class.
Instructions for the selection and use of consumables - from paint to cutters.
Photos of interiors from suppliers' catalogs - you can put internal links to the used article numbers of materials.
Instructions like "How to do such and such work yourself."

And now the question is - have you seen this somewhere? I've only seen it in directories so far, like this:

And such pages fit perfectly into the structure of the site, they are useful to visitors, they provide internal links. You just need to think about people, not about SEO.

3. City portal

Usually the city portal is a collection of news, a catalog of organizations, posters of various events and other things. Making the site more useful for users and getting internal links to the right pages is easy. It is enough to output data in a format useful to the user:

Not just a list of kindergartens or schools - but by districts and stops.
Any services like food delivery can be divided into round-the-clock and non-round-the-clock.
Activities are divided into free and paid. For children and adults. For preschool children, for elementary grades and so on.

Here is an example for Moscow:

And there will be many groups of requests like “where to go with a child 2/3/4 years old in Moscow”, “where to go with a girl at night in Moscow” and others.

How does the site structure for people allow you to find ideas for the site and improve conversions?

The “site structure for people” approach can be perfectly combined with the marketing approach. This works in niches with large checks, with a long way from the visitor to the client. Companies that are the first to learn how to build the structure of pages in such a way as to direct the future client to the right stage before the sale will sooner or later overtake competitors. Or they will not let their competitors bypass themselves.

What questions will interest me if I want to build a house, but I myself am not involved in construction?

How many floors and rooms do you need?
Order the project and construction separately or not? How is it better and why?
What form of house to choose (if it is not limited by the shape and size of the plot)?
Do you need a basement/ground floor?
Do you need an attic or attic?
Ceiling height?
What foundation is right for you?
What are the walls made of?
If there are several floors - what kind of floors should be made?
What is the roof made of?
How many chambers should be in a double-glazed window?

This is only part of the stages of building the "box". Each of these items can be "expanded" to the same list.

And here a huge field of activity opens up for the development of the site and the creation of new materials. For example, in my region, wall materials can offhand be called 7 or 8 (brick, shell rock, aerated concrete, timber, sip panels, cinder block, thermal house, foam concrete). Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. If the company is engaged only in construction, you can safely make a cluster of pages, professionally comparing all these materials.

And it will be very useful material. And the links between such pages visitors willingly follow. And the site rises to the top simply due to the fact that the time on the site and the number of page views are 2–2.5 times higher than those of competitors.

Such pages increase the credibility of the company and can generate leads. Subscription form of the form “Enter your email and phone number and get comparative characteristic top 10 wall materials in just 3 minutes” will give applications from potential customers.

This approach will not let you miss pages that could be missed when creating the site structure and when collecting requests. And each of these pages will allow you to place internal links to selling pages.

Also, on pages with a narrow focus, the conversion is higher. If you are reading this article, you may have a website. Imagine that you are not satisfied with the current hosting provider (your online store on Bitrix began to slow down after adding 30,000 products) and you are looking for a new one - which offer will suit you:

Great hosting for your website.
Hosting for large online stores on Bitrix.

Most likely the second. And it works in any niche, where most customers make a choice, and are not guided by the wow effect.

Site structure and promotion

The structure of the site and linking very strongly affect the position of the site. Of course, if the site meets the basic requirements:

There are no technical errors on the site that hinder the promotion of the site.
The information is up-to-date and competitive (for example, prices plus or minus the market average).
The site loads quickly and is user friendly.

How is it more or less correct to compare the effectiveness of promoting a large site that tries to cover the topic completely, and a small narrowly focused project that compete on a group of requests? If you do not know the financial indicators, you can compare the number of visitors divided by the number of pages on the site. For example, here are the averages for two topics:

The data for all sites is taken from the same services, so the errors for all are approximately the same. Competition - the percentage of queries for which sites overlap in the top 10. It does not take into account domain trust, site age, links, etc. - although large sites have an advantage in all these indicators.

I collected such data for absolutely different projects, in different niches. And there is only one dependence - sites operating in a narrower niche (with rare exceptions, less than 5%) collect many times more visitors per page. For example, here are sites that voluntarily show their traffic. I chose sites that have less than 1,000 pages in the Yandex and Google indexes:

The remaining 30 are specialized sites. What does it mean:

The site is not about all banking products in general and their comparison, but only about debit and credit cards. Or just about the mortgage and its conditions.
The portal is not about accounting from foreign economic activity to 1C, but only about everything for individual entrepreneurs.
The site does not sell 100,500 items of construction products, but only doors. Or just wooden doors.
The online store does not sell everything for needlework, but only everything for knitting.

Why do narrower sites have hundreds of times more visitors per page than larger competitors?

The less content, the easier it is to make it quality. An excellent example is backlinko.com, a website of a foreign SEO specialist. Hundreds of thousands of clicks from the search every month, despite the fact that the site has 71 pages. Internal linking there is also done perfectly - you want to click on each link in the text.

Pages on such sites are usually linked, provide more information. Where there will be 1 page on a large project, on a small one there will be several connected to each other into a cluster or group. And most often each of the group pages on a small project will be more complete than a page on a large one.

Due to the previous paragraph, visitors spend more time on the site, look at several pages. Follow internal links. That is, internal linking works many times better if the site has a cycle of materials that are conveniently connected to each other than if these are just links to transfer the weight of pages.

Many topics have their own slang or specialized terms. Small thematic sites are many times larger than large ones in terms of semantic coverage. More or less like this:

So it turns out that small sites with well-designed pages, with great content, with a good logical structure (visitors “hang” on the site and look at 5–10 pages each) collect traffic comparable to mastodons, at incomparable costs.

How to build the logical structure of the site?

If you have a commercial resource that makes money by selling a product or service, the correct logical structure can be described in one sentence:

A potential client on each of the pages of the site should see a simple and understandable next step for him, which brings him closer to concluding a deal.

In some cases, this is very easy to do. For example, online stores almost always work according to this scheme.

The goal is to place an order. To do this, the visitor must add the product to the cart. You can add a product to the cart either from the product card, sometimes from the category. This means that all the user's paths on the site need to be built in such a way that he gets into either a category or a product card. In the example above, 10 categories, an article (or several), neighboring articles can refer to a popular article.

And the rest of the pages that do not directly sell a product or service link to selling pages. It can be a question-answer section, help information, comparison pages, blog articles, news.

On small sites (10–100 pages) it's simple, the most basic pages are located in the menu, which means they receive links from all other pages. In addition to menus from other pages, internal links can also be placed for marketing or SEO purposes.

On medium sites (up to 10,000 pages) usually implemented either a catalog structure (if it is an online store) or headings. Pages are placed in groups (headings, categories), each page of the group links to other pages of the same heading. For SEO, the most important headings and pages are linked from other relevant headings.

On large portals (with hundreds of thousands and millions of pages) or the approach with categories is implemented (only adjusted for the number of categories), or simply all pages link to more or less suitable pages according to the Wikipedia principle. Any systematic work on linking on such projects is unrealistic for the following reasons:

Lots of UGC content – Users create site content.
The site receives traffic from hundreds of thousands of requests. You can only “pump” internal links of a page selectively if there are some pages that give the main result (selling something).
Often the traffic is event-based, or generally one-time. This is especially true for news resources - you just need to post more news and do it faster.

Website URL Structure

To date, there is no difference whether the site structure is organized by nesting levels (sometimes up to 4 or more levels) as in large projects:

Sometimes it happens like this - Main page/category/sub-category/sub-sub-category/ sub-sub-sub-category/page/page-option

This option is convenient because automatically all pages in the chain link to each other. The disadvantage is that you need to think over the structure of the site in advance, otherwise transferring pages from one section of the site to another will require setting up redirects. What kind of hard labor it is - you won’t understand until you need to spread several thousand pages into several hundred different sections.

The second approach - all pages of the site can be nested at levels 2-4:

But in fact, the product is on the second level, and the /p block displays either the current category, or some other store parameter.

The advantage of this approach is that all the main pages can generally be in the same category, and the remaining pages simply display lists for the convenience of users. For example, all products are located at site/productN100500, and the categories look like:

Home /notebook-asus/
Home /notebook-asus/8gb-ram
Home /notebook-asus/core-i3

They are simply listings of goods according to given characteristics. The main advantage of this approach for internal linking is that from such categories you can get dozens of internal links to promoted products.

The disadvantage is a lot of work either with the head or with the hands. Products themselves will not appear in the category, you will need to include them manually, or think over output templates.

I give examples for online stores as the most understandable, but the same principle can be applied to projects on a variety of topics. For example, for a site about dogs, information about the breed can be kept in one category, say, "Home / poroda / huski", and display links to it on dozens of other pages of the project:

Main page/srednie-dogs/
Main page/krasivie-dogs/
Home/dogs-dlya-semei-s-detmi/

Which internal linking option to choose?

If you know for sure that you will not have the time or opportunity to engage in point-to-point linking, choose one of the automatic schemes tied to the URL structure. The following options are available...

First, all pages link to each other:

In such a situation, all pages are more or less equivalent, all pages are linked to each other.

The third option - the weight is transferred to the final pages of the site. The scheme would be similar, only the arrows would go in the opposite direction (toward blocks of pages).

Any of these schemes is usually hardwired into the logic of the site engine. If you want to go to advanced internal linking, then the scheme will be something like this:

How will this be implemented in the URL structure and in physical structure site - depends on the technical solution used.

In my opinion, this option (or adapting it for your business) gives you maximum flexibility. In the example above - a specific model left the production and sale - was replaced with a similar one. And in more conservative topics, dozens and hundreds of internal links can be placed on the main selling pages in a year or two.

How to organize the storage of data on the site?

If it seems to you that the diagram from the previous picture is my hypotheses about content marketing “like in the West” and this will either never happen here, or someday in 5 years, go to any of the articles on request:

More than 1,000 materials that perfectly fit internal linking with the intention of inviting the visitor to walk closer to the checkout and unzip the wallet:

Each link leads to the corresponding section of Yandex.Market. Of course, within the framework of the Internet, 1000+ articles are a drop in the ocean. But this is Yandex. Which can be displayed by Yandex.Market to its entire audience for any commercial requests.

And big companies do the same:

Do you think big companies don't know how to count money? Experience tells me that the production of one page for these sites can cost tens (if not hundreds) of times more than the owner of an online store or a thematic site. And 2,000 articles for the example on the right almost certainly cost several million rubles (but rather the sum with 7 zeros).

There are many niches in Runet, where large companies will reach only after a few years. And all these years, it is you who can receive visitors and sell your products to them. You just need to start earlier, almost always this is enough.

To successfully implement internal linking that combines both SEO and marketing, take note of the following tricks:

Characteristics of goods or services. Everything that can be considered a characteristic should be stored in a format that allows you to get full information automatically. For example, if you sell wallpaper, all characteristics like "solid color", "large pattern", "white wallpaper", "black pattern" and other options should be assigned to the appropriate article. So that you can create a category of "white wallpaper with a black pattern" in a couple of clicks by simply adding up the characteristics.

It is better to see once than to read several times. Classic links also work well if they are appropriate. But in information materials and it is better to provide a beautiful linking output. At least banners, if appropriate:

Here's another good example:

Think big - the more possible target groups you can reach - the more visitors and sales you will get.

Content marketing works best in the long run. From year to year, search algorithms change, every month a new wow technology comes out that “should break the market and take a significant share of sales.” And projects that systematically work on the production of high-quality content simply grow every year. In attendance, in recognition, in money.

And this is not only in conservative niches, where nothing fundamentally new has appeared over the past 20 years and will not appear for another 20 years (for example, many construction niches). See how many visitors are attracted by projects dedicated to technology. Technology becomes obsolete every year, but the leading portals and many newcomers are quietly collecting their share of the audience.

Think about how to use existing content to create new pages that address the needs of your potential customers.

When designing a new site functionality (content section, filters, blog, question-answer, etc.), think about how you can quickly put useful and convenient links to the goods and services you sell from this section.

Consider efficiency immediately. Analyze competitors, make forecasts.

What if you have a small project?

Many of the techniques mentioned earlier are easy to implement in online stores or catalog sites. But what if you have a small project, a narrow topic? A universal option is a section with questions and answers.

Don't do everything on one page. A separate question - a separate page.
Please provide helpful answers. Pages “for SEO” with answers like “and you can find out by calling the phone” if they reach the TOP, they won’t stay there for a long time. In addition, on uninformative pages it is more difficult to link to other pages of the site.
Make the section convenient. No light gray fonts size 11. If you yourself are uncomfortable reading such pages, visitors will also be uncomfortable, and they will leave.
If there are many questions, make it easy to navigate. Subsections, headings.
Strange advice, but proven on their projects. If you have an online consultant, do not let visitors add questions. They will often be short, unintelligent and illiterate. And the same or similar. Which is bad for both convenience and SEO.
On the pages of questions, give the opportunity to contact you from the same pages - phone numbers, instant messengers, social networks.

In addition to questions and answers, you can use references, comparisons, instructions, standards. If you don't have many ideas for such sections, check out the top traffic sites in your niche in big cities. If old projects can still travel due to the link, domain age, site trust and other things, young sites have to create cool content.

Why does it generate sales?

If you are looking for "black women's long down jacket with a hood" - you will linger on this page:

And it is in the top 3 for many targeted queries. Including because of relinking - on other pages there are links with a direct entry of the request.

The next time you walk around the city, pay attention to the colors of the PVC window profiles, except for white and woodgrain. And then look in your city for something like “pvc windows %color% %city% price”. And look at the SERPs in a very competitive niche. Yes, at least in Moscow:

Even the screenshot shows that the price of windows with a color profile is 40% higher. Such a request can be perfectly worked out in the "question-answer" section, you can create a separate page with typical sizes and prices. And the buyer will call if everything suits him. And such pages can pump links to other pages. A solid benefit, in general.

As always, there is a little catch. In order for such pages to appear on the site, you first need to think, and then work.

How to do the right linking of the site - checklist

If you already have a site with a large number of pages, I can only advise the obvious - count the weight of the pages and link to the most important pages from the rest. This is the easiest and most painless way to “transfer” weight. Finally, a small checklist.

You must have a semantic core for the site - user requests distributed across the pages of the site. Information requests should be placed in the information section, commercial ones - on the selling pages.
If possible, there should be no cannibalization within a single project. That is, one group of requests on the site should be represented by one page. If there are several pages, the site will compete with itself in the search results, this is bad. If this is the case, combine them into one page, set up a redirect from a remote page.
When working with internal links, the ratio from paragraph 4 can not be observed, there is only one rule - do not go too far with anchors. It is better to naturally enter an incomplete query than to unnaturally enter a complete one.
Avoid broken links on the site if you have a lot of them - you "pour" the weight of the pages into nowhere.
On the donor page, 1 link to the acceptor page is enough, if there are several of them, the transferred weight will not increase from this. If you need to put several links, you can close unnecessary links in scripts.
Clickable links pass more weight than just links.
The link should look like a link (e.g. different color, underline, hover effect) if it is text.
An acceptor page can be downvoted for too unnatural internal linking environment. Therefore, it is better to use constructions of 2-3-4 words, while not repeating often within the site.
If an image is used as a link, the “alt” tag for this image will be taken into account as an anchor.
Search engines are smarter than you think, so don't try to "pump" important pages with js scripts with different ways hiding links.
Worry less. Any excessive manipulation on the part of the site is a signal that the site is trying to somehow outwit the search engine algorithms. I haven't seen a single site yet that gets a lot of pessimism for working with internal links if the links there just provide easy navigation (and promote landing pages in the process).
Use such linking blocks in which you yourself want to click on the link.
For a visited project, you can quickly promote new pages for non-competitive requests by simply putting links and getting transitions within the site. This trick also speeds up pages getting into the main index of search engines.
Working with reference - read the result. In SEO metrics or money. If you use internal links for marketing purposes - conduct tests, choose the best option.
If you don’t have relinking, implement it, you increase the time on the site, the number of page views.
If your site structure is built not on URLs, but on links, try to link within the thematic sections of the site.
If you don’t know where to get links from, start a blog or content section.

A little practice

Two simple rules:

Fix or remove broken links.
Make sure important pages get the most internal links.

Search for broken links on the site. How to check for free and quickly fix broken links?

The free Xenu program (you can download it from the official site) allows you to scan a small site in a few minutes and find broken links. Download, run. After installation:

To do this, use the combination Ctrl + R. Re-checking for errors is necessary because the program could make a mistake - at the time of the check, the link could not be available, although in fact everything is in order. This can happen due to a one-second failure of the site, due to a too long server response. If after re-checking the errors remain, check what is wrong. In order to open a page with a broken link, you need:

Decryption:

Go to the properties of the URL with the "not found" status.
There is a broken link in the "Page URL" section.
The "N pages linking to this one" section lists the page(s) on which the link is located.

All you have to do is fix the broken links.

How to find out the link weight of pages for internal linking?

For small sites (up to 2,000 pages) enough free version program Page Weight Lite, you can download it on the official website.

For small projects, 2 passes are enough to determine the most cited pages of the site. Setting a higher value makes sense only if after two iterations the difference in weights differs slightly, and you cannot understand which pages receive the most weight. To calculate the internal weight, it is better not to take into account external links. Today they are, tomorrow they are not --– so we disable this option.

Hello friends. Today I want to talk with you about competent internal linking of sites, and not just any sites, but specifically online stores. Once upon a time, when I dealt only with my information sites, I would start talking about content sites, but now the guys in the studio and I deal only with commercial sites, and 80% of them are online stores.

All stores are unique in their own way: different topics, engine, structure, different vision of a “convenient” site on the part of the owner. And for each site you have to implement solutions that are most often repeated from site to site. Today we will look at the most common linking options., among which you will definitely find something new and useful for your online store. In addition, I saved up examples of bad tricks, how not to do it.

I described in detail each linking option, why it is important and how to implement it correctly. In the meantime, a little general theory.

What is correct linking and why is it needed

Formally, a link from one page to another is already a link. But today we look at linking in the following way: linking is links or blocks of links that help site visitors find the right product or service faster and easier, get to the right page. Relinking a site helps search robots quickly index and re-index pages, and correctly distribute static weight between them.

Interests of users when linking in priority, after all, it is not allowed for customers to show dissimilar products in the block of similar products or to show other refrigerators, or, for example, car tires, in the block of related products when buying a refrigerator. Everything should be smart: first of all, conversion and sales, and SEO is only one of the channels for attracting traffic. In practice, the benefits for SEO and for real people are perfectly combined.

So, ideally, linking should solve the following tasks:

Assistance in navigation for visitors;
Speed up and improve indexing;
Passing static link weight to the required pages;
There must be something else, but it doesn't come to mind.

General rules for linking sites

Try to adhere to the following rules when linking(regardless of site type):

Internal links should not contain the attribute. Otherwise, the weight from the donor page will leak, but it will not be added to the acceptor page, that is, it will simply evaporate.
The rel=”nofollow” attribute should be used when the link leads to a non-indexed page, but the link is required. Accordingly, there is no need to force the robot to follow the link and waste time and crawl budget. An example of such a case can be seen on my blog: at the bottom of the post there is a block "What's new on the forum:", links from there go with a redirect to a url pointing to the last post in the forum topic, which is not indexed. Ideally, you should get rid of such links using JS, which, as I already wrote, the method still works.
Links should always lead to indexed pages of the site, otherwise the story described in paragraph 1 above will be repeated.
Even when placing internal links, you should use unique anchors when linking. Most likely, this rule is applicable in online stores only for the info section, if it exists, and for manual links. Other links from menus, blocks, filters, tags, etc. are not amenable to dynamic change, and there is no need to do so, because their purpose is simply to be a reference that passes static weight.
There are no restrictions and recommendations on the number of internal links on the pages of the site. People often ask me, they say, I heard somewhere that more than 150 internal links on a page is very bad, what should I do? Who said this, where such information came from - I do not know. But I know for sure that it all depends on the specific site and the specific situation. The most important thing to start from is user convenience, there should be exactly as many links as the visitor of your site needs. If you have any doubts, just look at the sites of your main competitors, most likely they are all similar in structure, navigation and other basic elements, you can learn from their successful experience.
Internal links should always be direct and go strictly to landing pages. This means that following the link should return a 200 OK response. I'm not saying that broken links are unacceptable, this is obvious, but I'm saying that links should go without (and if there is also not a 301, but a 302 redirect, then it's a real disaster). Not infrequently, when the structure is changed, or through the fault of the layout designer (forgot the slash at the end of the link, for example), internal links go through a redirect, it is very difficult to trace by eye. Everyone should definitely run their site at least once with a crawler, for example, or any other tool.

I would be grateful if you tell me in the comments something else for this section from your practice. Well, I turn to the description of schemes and methods of linking online stores.

Page linking schemes for online stores

What to do with the menu, how to link from it, how to get rid of unnecessary links, etc.? Personally, I think that the cross-cutting elements of the site, in particular the menu, are not taken into account by search engines, or they are taken into account very weakly, because. are present on every page and little changes from their absence/presence.

However, there are various options available. You don’t have to go far, I will open 4 large online stores that first came to mind: www.dns-shop.ru, www.mvideo.ru, www.eldorado.ru and www.tehnosila.ru. Let's consider each in more detail:

On the Technosila website, the menu is like a menu, they decided not to do anything with it.

On the M.Video website, absolutely the entire navigation menu with categories and subcategories is closed in the noindex tag. A similar picture is on the Eldorado website. Close menu in noindex it only makes sense not to take into account its text component, so that the menu does not fall into the snippet on the search results, so that it does not interfere with the determination of the relevant page (although this does not happen often). In this regard, I fully support the use of the noindex tag, but I don’t like that this tag is taken into account only in Yandex, and Google ignores it, but in Google, the description content is taken as a snippet much more often and problems with low-quality snippet rarely occur.

On the DNS site, only the deepest categories in the menu are closed in noindex (we also note that in addition to noindex, rel=”nofollow” is also used for links - I don’t know why), and global and parent categories are indexed. Interestingly, the DNS site uses tagsand. These tags are not related to global web search, but are intended to manage indexing for corporate solutions, such as intranets. Apparently the crazy seo-specialists involved in this site misinterpreted the meaning and application of these tags.

Menu in the footer. With the menu in the footer, you can do nothing, not close it in any way and not be afraid of leaking weight to technical pages. As for the content, I like the way it is implemented in the examples above. The menu contains contact details, social networks, as well as links to important information pages: payment, delivery, about the company, etc. It makes sense to duplicate the navigation through the product sections in the footer only if there are no more than 5-7 of these sections (that is, it is NOT necessary to do it on the vcedetyam.ru website.)

The number of links in the menu. Many people worry about the number of internal links on each page of the site, and with menus like those in Eldorado and M.Video, this is not at all surprising. What can be done about it and is it necessary? As an option: display an incomplete list of categories, subcategories, subsubcategories, etc. in the menu. And limit yourself to displaying only parent sections. To make it clear, I’ll show you with an example: let’s take the Eldorado website, the menu item “Electronics”, it now has about 100 links, but it was possible to display only 6 (TVs, Computers, Phones, Software, Photo and Video and Car products), that is, exclude child elements. But there is also back side- the lack of detail will confuse visitors, so you, for example, can immediately determine where to look for faxes, memory cards or headphones? Me not. So this option of “losing weight” of the menu is not always applicable, first of all, you should try to look through the eyes of your visitor (and consider him dumb, no matter how strange it sounds :), and it is advisable to check hypotheses with some kind of A / B test.

Based on practice, I can say that manipulating links does not give any tangible result in seo. I tried to remove and add links, I tried to close links in JS - this had absolutely no effect on positions and traffic.

Breadcrumbs as a Linking Element

The next integral element of any site, and especially an online store, is breadcrumbs. The usefulness of this element is difficult to overestimate, the crumbs have an informational and navigational meaning: after looking at them, the visitor understands which section he is in and can always go to the parent category if he is interested in a brand or product category.

Crumbs are difficult to consider as an important element for linking, because in 95% of cases, the same categories and sections are involved in crumbs as in the navigation menu. In other cases, the crumbs may contain links to seo filters from a certain category, which are generated by a bundle of a product category with some property or characteristic. In this case, the link from the crumbs allows indexing such filter pages.

With breadcrumbs, there are both unambiguous solutions, and not so:

Indexing. I'm quite sure that you don't need to hide crumbs from indexing with noindex and/or rel=”nofollow”. Having opened a dozen well-known store sites, I also did not see a single case of a ban on indexing.

schema.org markup. Marking bread crumbs is worth it. This will affect the beauty of the snippet in Google, although, unfortunately, it will not work functionally. (If you remember, before the navigation chain in Google contained clickable links, but one day they became just text.) The markup does not affect the formation and naming of the navigation chain in Yandex, but the crumbs themselves do.

Presence of current page in navigation. FAQ, whether or not to display the title/title of the current page the user is on in the navigation chain. I believe that the title of the current page should be displayed as a title in large font below the breadcrumbs, and in the breadcrumbs themselves, only the parent categories should be displayed without the title of the current page.

My opinion is subjective, and you decide how you like it best. By the way, on the websites of Technosila and MVideo there are crumbs without the name of the product, while DNS and Eldorado have the name of the product.

Dropdown menu in items. Another ambiguous solution is a drop-down list of categories that are on the same logical level. In a sense, it is very similar to the navigation menu. Here is an example that I took from the site http://ru.biksiko.com:

Or here is another example https://004.ru/catalog/kholodilniki/

I don’t know how useful and convenient it is, but such a solution is quite rare.

Another element that is used ubiquitously is related products and recommendations. This block of links, no matter how it is called and what functionality it does not have - similar products, recommended products, related accessories, other products of this brand, etc. - intended primarily for the user. And it has a marketing goal: a second joystick for a set-top box, a bracket for a TV, a mouse pad - all this is to sell an additional product, and not for seo.

This is only a formal relink. If we talk about seo, then we need some more technical / algorithmic approach to linking, one of these algorithms is ring linking.

Ring linking

I don’t know who came up with the logic of work and the name of this algorithm. Although I thought that I came up with when I used this algorithm for my sites, and then released two modules for DLE. But it turned out that everything was invented before us: there are earlier references on the Internet than my posts about linking and modules. But it doesn't really matter now.

The main task of ring linking is to evenly distribute the weight between pages of the same level. The main marker in this case is the id of the page in the database. That is, there is a consistent selection and substitution of links to products that come before or after the current product. For example, each page links to 10 previous pages, and at the end the chain is closed, linking the very first and the very last product in the chain. With this algorithm, each page will accurately receive the same number of incoming and outgoing links, as well as the same internal weight. Dropping out of the index of pages from the chain does not break the algorithm, because we link to 10 pages at once. I think you understand the principle of work.

I made loopback modules for my information and entertainment sites and only tested them there, but in theory it should work for any site with a large number of pages. According to my experiments, this gave an amazing result: thanks to such relinking, I achieved 100% (and not approximately, but exactly, page to page) indexing of absolutely all pages for sites where I used the module.

It is logical that there can be no question of at least some similarity of pages or products, if the selection is simply by id from the database. To do this, in the module, I came up with restrictions that somehow solved this problem - to make a selection by id, but within a certain category or subsection. Thanks to this, it was possible to achieve the output of the same type and similar links without violating the technical requirements - not one huge ring was formed for the entire site, but many rings within the categories.

If we talk about online stores, then in my entire life I have seen only one single store where ring linking is used - www.haldi.ru. You can see an example by going to the page of any product and scrolling down to the “Other products” block.

In order to preserve the similarity of products, a restriction was made there on the output of products from a common parent category. As you can see, there is no need to talk about similarity anyway. In general, the site is quite interesting in terms of seo-shmeo, many different teams have been promoting it (including my team), so I recommend that you study it.

In summary, I will say that this is a very dubious linking option for an online store and I am unlikely to recommend it.

Random linking

An even more ridiculous version of linking, which I called “random linking”. Under this name, you can combine several types of linking. The first option is pure random relinking, when there is a certain block in which links to N random pages are displayed. Links can be either dynamic, that is, the set of links changes each time the page is visited, or static, that is, a random set of links is cached in the database on the first visit to the page and displayed in this form on subsequent visits.

Another option is to relink pages by search queries transitions. If you remember, about 6 years ago there was such an HTracer script that pulled the page address and search query from the referrer, if the transition was made from the search engine and saved to the database, then a block with links was formed on the pages of the site, which contained the keyword in the anchor, by which there was a transition from the search. There was also a module for DLE, I think it was called "Transitions" and had similar functionality. Soon, search engines filtered out sites using this linking scheme, quite rightly treating it as search engine spam. I wanted to find a live example for you or take a screenshot, but I did not find a single site with such a scheme, even among warez sites, not to mention online stores.

You can come up with a lot of dubious schemes if you wish: a block with links to non-indexed pages to speed up their indexing, a block with links to pages with maximum / minimum visits in order to pump them with static weight.

Linking from category / product descriptions

Another useless activity, in my opinion, is linking from seo texts in categories or product descriptions to other categories or products.

Firstly, seo descriptions in categories online stores are not made for people to read, it’s stupid to hide it, realizing that only an SEO specialist could go to the site on the request “buy a 4k TV” and be interested in the text, not the goods :) Isn’t it? Therefore, there is no benefit for visitors in the links from the description, and I don’t see the seo benefits from the link from the description on the scale of a large site. I am talking about seo-usefulness because I had to put down such links in my work and I can say that the effect of them has never been observed.

Have you ever seen yourself linking from product description in an online store? Not from the characteristics, but from the text of the description. I don’t remember such stores, but my colleagues helped me find an interesting copy - the Labyrinth bookstore.

An example from the pages http://www.labirint.ru/books/409187/ and http://www.labirint.ru/books/320735/

Anchors "book", "because", "time"! It's crazy, they just do a word search from the description, match the title of the book, and link. They also link to the main and key sections. You can walk around the site and look at it.

This is complete nonsense. Such links will be clicked only by chance, the “ala Wikipedia” effect does not work - the links are not contextual and it is not clear where they lead. By the way, the same functionality was in the HTracer script, which I already mentioned, it searched for suitable words taking into account morphology and linked articles to each other within the site. I've tried this on my infosites but to no avail, although I firmly believe that if it could ever work it would have been in those days (6 years ago) and not today.

Stop writing about useless tricks, after all, I should write about what will bring a positive effect, and not vice versa.

Linking from info section publications

In almost any commercial topic, there are many information requests that cannot be covered by categories, products, or other pages. And it happens that for general queries, info articles are shown instead of product pages. A vivid example from my practice is the theme of adult stores (sex shop, it so happened that we work with them a lot), for interest, enter “vibrator” in Yandex and look at the output. Sometimes the only way to break into the top is to create a quality info article on the site.

For one of our clients, we went this route. The entire catalog, categories and subcategories, filters and tags, product pages - everything was polished and brought to the ideal, even unique texts were written on each page. There was simply no more developed site in my practice, I'm serious. But traffic stubbornly did not want to go to commercial pages. When I collected CL, I did not delete infoqueries, but clustered and put them into a separate group, as a result I got about 50 topics for future publications. Since the site already had a section of articles, we immediately began to slowly fill it. To my surprise, infoqueries began to shoot in the top1-top3 of Yandex and Google. As a result, the traffic on the site was brought up to 700-900 visitors per day, and only 15-20% of the traffic went to commercial pages. Of course, we have linked the articles to the relevant product categories and filters (no more than 3-4 links per publication).

But there was also a better decision that we made - to create contextual product informers. That is, blocks where the most popular products from the corresponding category of the catalog were displayed. With price, name, rating, ability to add to cart, etc. It turned out very organic and cool.

Despite all the steepness, the client's business never became successful. But this is already beyond the scope of this post, and certainly the failure has nothing to do with the relinking we are talking about :)

There is another example in our practice, this time a positive one. For certain categories of goods, next to the characteristics and descriptions, links to instructions for installation and care of the goods are displayed. Judging by the behavior, these pages are useful to buyers, they read them, save them in pdf. We even recorded videos for the most popular pages. Instructions are well ranked in the search and generate transitions, knowing this, we placed product informers on them. As a result, several dozen orders placed per month from such pages.

With this example, I wanted to remind you that linking is not done for the sake of linking, but for the sake of a certain result - sales. So I advise you to masturbate not on anchors and the number of internal links, but on something more pleasant :) Well, you understand ...

Another good example of an information page with product informers and multiple linking on Yandex.Market. I understand that it’s very strange to focus on Yandex in terms of seo, but it’s worth focusing on conversion and sales.

Tagging for an online store / seo filters

I'm sure each of you has heard about tagging, burning or expanding semantics, seo filters, etc. All this is about the same thing - creating additional landing pages for search queries (usually low-frequency queries). The trend is 3-4 years old, no more. They rose and flourished on this wave (a post about clusterers was written a long time ago, you can imagine how many more have appeared since then).

For online stores, large portals, directories, tagging is the most effective and understandable way to generate traffic from search engines. Even before it became a trend and it began to be publicly and often spoken about, I already practiced this approach. As one of the most striking examples, I published and clearly showed how this affects traffic.

For several years, advanced agencies and studios have been practicing seo filters, and the network has already accumulated a lot of sites with a deep study of semantics. In Moscow and other large cities, everything has been polished in competitive topics, where the use of tagging is no longer an innovation that puts you ahead of your competitors, but rather an attempt to keep up. In the regions it is easier, thoughtful seo takes out competitors, but this will also come to an end.

Six months ago, there were rumors that Yandex was going to punish the senseless and unjustified generation of such seo filters as poor-quality and useless pages (remember the days of the ACS). But the matter calmed down, and I did not observe a single case of punishment. Yandex's motives are clear - no one needs categories with only a few products, or if the products do not meet expectations. Wait and see.

As I said, seo filters are usually obtained from a bunch of product categories and some properties. The most common example of a filter is brands. The easiest way to show this is with an example household appliances, for example, TVs, where links with brands have a higher frequency than a general request without a brand. Next come the properties inherent in a certain category of goods, in the case of TVs, these are: type of matrix (LED, OLED, LCD, plasma), resolution (Full HD, 4K, 8K), technologies (3D, Smart TV, Android), type (curved , backlit), etc. It is very easy to extract such filters from product specifications, or pull out “folk filters” from wordstat. Cross-filters also often work - for example, linking properties with brands - 4k Samsung TV, Philips TV with Ambilight backlight.

Such filters are made for seo, respectively, pages should be prepared and optimized for them - titles, meta tags, descriptions. Links to such pages go directly from the filter block, or they are created as separate subcategories, it all depends on the complexity of the technical implementation:

The Technopark online store is generally fierce nerds on filters. All the filters in the sidebar are clickable and go to the corresponding high traffic pages. There is no other way, the competition is tough!

There are less elegant solutions, just a random set of filter links according to search queries. Like on Wikimart. Very ugly:

Another ugly example. I found this page in the top 10 in Moscow for the query "buy a TV". For some reason, it is not the general category of TVs that is ranked, but the “cheap” tag, which generally has a blank page:

So, we found out about tagging, we talked about links from the filter block in categories. Implementation examples are not difficult to find - take any site from the top in Moscow on a general request.
Personally, I think that we need to go further and do what no one else does. I stubbornly scrolled through the TOP50 of Moscow in electronics and did not find a single example of what I wanted to show you - links to seo tags from product characteristics. Except for our clients, only one site has surfaced in my memory where I saw a decent implementation, this is SotMarket, which has slid into a complete shithole, turning into a doorway. However, remnants of the former glory are still in place:

Pay attention to the underlined text - these are links to the corresponding seo filters. I dare to suggest that sometimes it can be useful to live visitors.

Clear benefits for promotion and search robots- a large number of internal links gives a lot of static weight to pages and will keep them in the index. In short, a cool solution, but not easy to implement, at least our clients pay a lot of money for such implementations to their programmers or contractors. Believe me, it's worth it!

Verdict: Linking is good!

You read a great post with tips and live examples, and I wanted to end there, but I decided that it would be wrong to take it like this and leave you alone with your thoughts, questions and, possibly, doubts. So let's make some kind of summary + short answers to questions that were not discussed:

It can be stated with certainty indexing improvement due to relinking- often pages are not indexed or drop out of the index as insufficient quality, in fact, they simply lack the weight, and this weight will be given to them by internal links.

Number of links to link it doesn't matter - there is no definite number of links from a page that would be considered normal. There should be exactly as many links as there will be enough live site visitors for comfortable site navigation. Go to the metrics web browser and view dozens of visitor behavior records. You will be surprised by the results!

How does internal linking affect positions? Not directly. But thanks to relinking, the pages are confidently kept in the index, and due to the greater static weight, the page should rank better for all target queries, but not separately for some query. Please note that we are still talking about online stores and automatic linking from menus, filters, blocks and everything else that we talked about above.

How to choose the right scheme - linking from product cards to categories, from categories to product cards or from products to products? Previously, there was a lot of talk about this topic and, it seems, they came to a logical conclusion: if the pages of product cards have the greatest traffic potential, then you should try to distribute all the weight on them, if categories, then try to link to categories from product cards as much as possible. To give an example: when buying a laptop or phone, most people ask specific model laptop or phone, respectively, product cards have the greatest potential. If a person is looking for wallpaper, for example, he is unfamiliar with the articles or names of specific wallpaper collections, he is looking for “buy wallpaper”, adding a maximum color or property to the request (vinyl, non-woven, paintable). In this example, categories, subcategories and seo filters have potential. What types of pages need to be promoted is absolutely clear, while I deny the need to purposefully put more links somewhere, and deprive some pages of these links. In my work, I adhere to the schemes I have described, without changing them in any way depending on the type of pages being promoted.

Manual linking for online stores is inappropriate. The only place where manual labor can come in handy is the information section, where you will wisely need to put contextual links to the relevant sections and or product cards, introduce product informers. In other places, this type of slave labor should not be used :)

Finally, I'm done. If I find in the comments interesting questions I will add the answers to them to my list. In the meantime, thanks for your attention!