Cleaning House: Your Internal Links

The Google spiders are not perfect, although they are very good. They sometimes see things that aren’t there, and this can hurt you if they report incorrect findings back to the head spider.The wrong information is often far worse than no information at all.

Internal links that are found to be inconsistent when it comes to urls are the most common mistake that can lead to poor ranking. It is a common mistake, it’s an easy to correct mistake and it is also a massively expensive mistake if you leave it unaddressed. Suppose that I have a link to www.PetStyles.com/DoggieDuds.html in one place, and simply to PetStyles.com/DoggieDuds.htm in another. I know they both go to the same page on my site.

Unfortunately, the spider doesn’t always know that. What I see as correct could be different from the spiders. The spiders may see these links as going to two separate pages with identical content which is not an accurate view. Hear that ugly sound? It’s my ranking, going down the tubes. Google  despises duplicate content.

Fortunately, there is a very simple fix. Start by adjusting all of your internal links to match, consistently using either ‘www.’ . Set up a permanent redirect, so when someone types in your site name, it automatically redirects to the www. version. It really is that simple. We usually are not big fans of redirects, but in this type of case they work well.

Merely avoiding the appearance of ‘evil’ is important when it comes to Google. Another pitfall can occur if you purchase different domains. This is a sound practice to help protect your brand, but can lead to the same problem with ‘duplicate’ content. Again, the spiders don’t always get the same view of things that you do as a human. They do not understand motive – just characters they index.

Simply redirect all alternate domain names to your main company site. Some web hosts don’t provide a 301 redirect, but ‘park’ your redirected names and keep the user in the same domain.

Getting to the internal links; never forget that it is important to watch your links from content you have put out on the web as well. Make sure that all your inbound links are consistent in their direction. It’s easy to skimp on this, but it is a necessary evil.

When you have cleaned up all of your links and redirected your traffic to show the spiders that you have no duplicate content, you will probably see your search engine ranking improve. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen soon enough in most cases. A little hard work will pay off!