The most common SEO internal linking mistakes

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Your website's internal SEO linking can be a goldmine of SEO opportunities that is completely under your control.

Do you dare to dig?

Using Site Audit , an advanced SEO analysis tool that includes 135 technical markers, we analyzed over 150,000 random websites with 175 million pages and 15 billion unique links to discover the frequency of internal SEO linking issues. Our research shows that many websites are not using their full potential due to easily fixable errors.

SEO Internal Linking Errors - SEMrush Study
To help you make this study useful, we provide information about each error with an explanation, as well as an assignment of the severity level and the advantage level.

Severity shows how crucial the detected problem is for positioning.

It is displayed on a scale of 1 to 3, with 3 being the most critical.

Advantage is the capacity for improvement that you have if you solve that problem.

This metric considers both how common the problem is and how severe it is, and is measured from 1 to 3, with 3 being the level where you can gain the most benefit.

The infographic we have designed shows the percentage of affected websites, pages or links.

Due to the size of the data analyzed, these numbers are representative of how severely specific bugs impact the Internet at large.

To illustrate the magnitude of the problem on a typical affected website, we have calculated an average.

By excluding the highest and lowest values, we get a picture of what you're likely to see on your website if you have this problem.

If you are reading this, it is because you surely know what a link is, and you know that link building is an important part of the SEO of any project.

Furthermore, when we say link building, nine times out of ten we are email germany talking about getting external links to our website, not internal linking.

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Why is internal linking important for SEO?
Backlinks are a well-known ranking factor. If a page gets many external links pointing to it, its authority grows and Google positions it better in search results.

Internal links rarely get as much attention as they deserve, despite the fact that they play an important role in a website's performance, from its crawlability by search engine bots to the distribution of a website's authority among the different pages within it.

Before we dive into the actual study, let’s define some basic terms to make sure we’re all on the same page.

PageRank
It is Google's first ranking algorithm that evaluates the number and quality of links on a page to determine its importance and authority.

To put it simply, links from important pages add authority to the page they link to, and links from low-quality or untrustworthy pages detract from the importance of the page they link to.

PageRank distribution is one of the most important parts of the entire link building process (see the term Link Equity).

Crawling budget