Today's question comes from Rob in Los Angeles.
Rob asks, do internal website links with exact match keyword
anchor texts hurt a website?
These links help our users navigate our website properly.
Are too many internal links with the same anchor text
likely to result in a ranking downgrade because of Penguin?
Good question.
My answer is, typically not.
Typically, internal website links will not cause you any
sort of trouble.
Now, the reason why I say, typically not rather than a
hard no is just because as soon as I say a hard no,
there'll be someone who has like 5,000 links all with the
exact same anchor text on one page.
But if you have a normal site--
a catalog site, or whatever, you've got bread crumbs,
you've got a normal template there.
And that's just the way people find their way around the site
and navigate, you should be totally fine.
That's not the sort of thing that I would worry about.
You might end up, because of bread crumbs or the internal
structure of the navigation, with a bunch of links that all
say the same thing, that point one page.
But as long as that's all within the same domain, that's
just on site links.
That's the sort of thing where, because of the nature
of you having a template, and you have many pages, it's kind
of expected they you'll have a lot of links that all have
that same anchor text that point to a given page.
I wouldn't worry about that.
It's not the kind of thing where internal links within a
domain would typically have any sort of issue unless--
there's always the one person who takes that way too far and
has a gajillion links all on one.
But if you were a regular website and you just have a
normal template and you have plenty of pages, that's not
the sort of thing where you'd need to worry about it.
Hope that helps.