How to make competent internal linking. How to make internal sewerage in a private house with your own hands How to make internal pages in the menu

Internal sewerage in its structure is practically no different from. Even in some moments it is easier to do.

Firstly, most pipes are not 110, but 50 size (internal diameter in millimeters). Secondly, these pipes are much easier to join yourself without the help of another person. Thirdly, they cut faster and easier. By the way, we cut both wide and thin pipes with an ordinary wood hacksaw with hardened teeth made in Germany.

The main meaning in internal sewerage is the same as in external sewerage. Horizontal sections must be laid with a certain slope. Only in pipes with a diameter of 50 mm is it necessary to make a slope of 1 cm more. For every meter of pipe there is a 4 centimeter slope (in pipes with a diameter of 110 mm this slope was 3 centimeters).

Why is such a specific slope needed at all? Why can’t it be 10 or 15 centimeters per 1 meter, because the greater the slope, the better the water will drain? That's right, the water will drain better, but if we only poured water into the sewer. The fact is that with a large slope of the horizontal section of the sewer, the water will flow away too quickly and it will turn out that the water will drain, and small solid particles of debris may remain in the pipe. This is especially important for sewer pipes through which waste from toilets passes. In this case, if the slope is very large, then the water leaves and the poop))) remains in the pipe.

But I would like to immediately note that deviations from the norms of slopes can be allowed, but only in areas of no more than 1.5 meters. If you need to change the slope in a small area up to 1.5 meters long, you can safely do this in big side. This, as I was told, is the norm.

Just like when laying large pipes, it is better to replace all 90-degree elbows with two 45-degree elbows. This is 2 times more expensive per elbow, but your sewer will be much better protected from blockages.

It is also very important when laying sewers on long horizontal sections to install so-called revisions. What it is? I'll tell you with an example. From the washbasin and dishwasher in the kitchen there is a pipe with a diameter of 50 mm, the length of this section is 7 meters. So, approximately in the middle of this section, I brought the pipe up to the floor level. This outlet will be at the level of the finished floor with a plug. I made it in the corridor near the wall. Then there will be either a cabinet or a mirror. But if the sewer gets clogged, it is very difficult to break through a 7-meter section. And with such revisions everything will be much simpler. I hope that it will not be useful, but it would be better. It is recommended to do exactly the same for.

All internal sewage pipes were laid in a dug trench and covered with sand. Then you need to pour water, compact this sand well under the pipes with your hands, and then add more sand, pour in more water, and preferably walk around.

That's all. Now photo report:

Left: black, thinnest pipe - water pipe; the thickest pipe - output to the inspection floor level for cleaning the sewer; the middle pipe is the outlet for the washing machine slightly above floor level. Right: outlet for the toilet and riser to the second floor. On the right in the corner: outlet for the washbasin in the toilet. Note: This is the furnace room and toilet on the first floor. There will be a partition between them in the future.

The outlet in the kitchen for the sink and dishwasher is slightly above floor level. In the future there will still be a bifurcation there.

Internal linking is an effective SEO optimization method. This is the placement of links within a site that connect its pages to each other. In a broader sense, linking improves the ease of navigation around the site.

Why do you need to do internal linking?

Thanks to a well-organized linking system, you can significantly increase site traffic and its position in search engines. Internal site linking not only connects pages with links, but also redistributes link juice across landing pages to give more weight to promoted pages.

How to increase website traffic

Convenient navigation.
Using the “Similar Products” or “Similar Articles” link block.
Use of contextual links and thematic anchors.

Located within one text, they will help you quickly find similar articles and obtain the most reliable information on a specific issue. Links make it easy to navigate the site and help increase the user’s time on the site.

At the end of the text, you can add a link to a similar article and the comment “We recommend reading.”

Types of Key Queries

There are low-frequency (LF), mid-frequency (MF) and high-frequency (HF) keywords.

Low frequency

Low-frequency queries are as specific as possible. They consist of 5−8 words. Users enter such queries to search for a specific service or product. Typically, this is a basic combination of words and its clarifying elements: address, price, reviews, names of certain brands. They are requested the least often, but due to their precise wording they can attract a large amount of targeted traffic, which can perform a targeted action on the page (buy a product, leave a request, fill out a feedback form).

Midrange

Mid-frequency queries consist of several words. Requested by visitors during the intermediate phase of information collection. MF queries are the “golden mean” and it is imperative to use them in website promotion. According to statistics, about 70% of users use medium-frequency queries.

High frequency

High-frequency queries are usually information-oriented. Visitors are looking for general information about a specific topic, product or service. HF requests are the most competitive.

Internal linking involves the following types of links:

Contextual

These are links placed in a fragment of text into which they fit within the meaning. Links are placed evenly across the page. Contextual links are a great source of traffic. They most often bring representatives to the page target audience. The effectiveness of contextual links can be checked by the time the user spends on the web resource. The best anchor for contextual links is a readable keyword phrase.

End-to-end

“Breadcrumbs” (from the English breadcrumbs) are an element of the site’s navigation structure. The exile got its unusual name from the Brothers Grimm fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel”, the heroes of which found their way to the house using bread crumbs scattered along the road.
Navigation elements help the user not to get lost on the site and always see the current location on the site. They are a strip at the top of the page between the header and the site article. Thanks to “breadcrumbs”, the user can return to the URL from which he began the transition to subsequent ones.

To promote a page, you need to concentrate as much weight on it as possible, that is, “the more links, the more important the page”

Statistical weight

Statistical weight is independent of search queries and text. It is calculated by counting the total weight transferred by pages using links. The more links a donor page contains, the less weight each link transfers to recipient pages.

Dynamic weight

Dynamic weight is the result of the activity of site users, the number of clicks on links. It is constantly changing, it is not possible to measure it.

Types (schemes) of internal linking

There is no universal internal linking scheme. Its choice depends on the topic of the site and the requests being promoted.

There are three basic linking schemes.

"Ring"

The simplest and most popular linking scheme. Weight is transferred from section and subsection pages to leaf pages, which are promoted by low-frequency queries, and the leaf pages are interconnected. This linking scheme has a significant drawback: if one page falls out, the connection is broken and all pages lose weight, and the linking scheme becomes meaningless.

An improved version of the scheme is when pages link not only to the adjacent and promoted one, but also to each other. So even the loss of one link does not break the chain.

"Star"

The classic linking scheme, in which all pages are linked to each other. In this case, each page receives many incoming links and the likelihood of communication disruption is minimal. If any page drops out of the PS index, the weight of the remaining pages will not change significantly. All pages will be independent, and indexing will be significantly faster. The disadvantage of the scheme is the difficulty of working with a large group of pages. The “star” linking scheme is relevant for online stores.

"Ladder" (hierarchical)

The weight is transferred to the pages where MF queries lead. For example, from the main page there are links to section pages, and the section page and product cards are linked to each other.

Correct internal linking of a website is the most important mechanism for optimizing a web resource. It is equally effective for non-profit and commercial topics. Proper use of internal linking schemes and principles guarantees the effective promotion of search queries, regardless of their frequency.
Interlinking will allow you to evenly distribute links within the site, which will make it more authoritative for search robots.

If you want to promote your website to the TOP of search results, then sign up for a course on SEO optimization

Dmitry Skalubo

This article will be useful primarily for those who do not yet have a website. If you already have a website, you may find some ideas for improving the existing structure or creating new sections.

Here are my observations from my own experience working with external and internal links. Just what personally worked well or poorly for me on several dozen diverse projects:

For a new project, there is almost no point in waiting 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 request into the anchor of the link.
A link that users regularly follow works much better than one that is simply there somewhere.
All other things being equal (if two pages are very similar in content, site trust, behavioral factors, etc.) the higher linking page will be.
Great content will not go unnoticed – they will link to it even without you.
It is sometimes faster to increase positions and traffic with internal links than by creating new content. Yandex and Google love links.

A site’s filter or ban in search engines also comes most quickly precisely because of 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 patriots, but the Russian-language 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 a site, building links. Not a purchase, but first of all working with thematic sites, their authors, forums and so on. Creating better content that will be shared.

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

For Russian-language projects aimed at residents of Russia, in the first year of the project’s life, from 50 to 95 percent of visitors are brought by 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 website page:

How well the page content matches the user's request. The quality of the content on the page, the ease of its consumption, and the extent to which it solves the visitor’s problem.
The volume of content, its readability (markup), uniqueness, page loading speed, additional “features” such as micro markup, https protocol, correct display on the user’s device.
User involvement, behavioral factors. This is the click-through rate of the page and domain at different search positions, the bounce rate, the depth of site viewing, and the time on the site.

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

What's good about this example:

The block with an internal link is placed as if 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 included in the anchor.
Good readability, it is clear what the user will see when he follows the link.
In a linking block that does not go out of line with the theme of the page, you can enter from one to 10 words that will give additional traffic for low-frequency and low-competition requests for the current page. The 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 linking block complements the content of the page, increases its volume and readability, and increases the chance that the user will linger on the site to learn more about balcony insulation.

What, in my opinion, could 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's another example:

What's good about the second example:

Prices are indicated.
Links are divided into groups.
A separate block of advantages of ordering from 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. This block copes with the SEO component (transferring weights to important pages). The downside is that on the page about balconies there are 3 links exclusively about windows; they do not provide any added value and are most likely not needed by the user.

A few more reasons to set up proper linking

For large projects, linking blocks are one of the ways to quickly index website pages. The most understandable (albeit not entirely correct) example is news sites; it is critical for them that all news be included in 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, news output is generated based on RSS feeds. This is what it looks like:

Such results are generated precisely by sending data to Yandex.News and Google News. Here's how linking is used on a news site:

Such blocks on any website will speed up the entry of new pages into search results. A little 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 SEO. The main advantage is the correct alignment of user paths through the site and, as a result, an increase in conversion. The most “fat” example from personal experience:

The website included a section with reference information.
After 3-4 months, the traffic to the help section from the search was several times higher than the traffic to the main selling pages of the site.
Over the next 4 months, experiments were carried out to place links to sales pages on reference pages.
Selling pages in search grew for basic queries by an average of 25–30% (SEO effect, which, however, could be the result of other work on the site).
From 5 to 11 percent of those who went to the sales page via links in the linking blocks ordered goods (on average, about 8% conversion). Despite the fact that the average conversion of sales pages for all traffic sources, including search traffic, was rarely higher than 3%.

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

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

In the linking block, a UTM tag was sewn into the link indicating which page the click came from.
In the analytics system, for the purity of statistics, data is taken, where the entry pages to the site are pages that have a linking block.
Website visitors who have become clients are counted by tags (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 website running on HTML files. This method has only one drawback - you will not have quick access to transparent statistics for each link if you do not have a connection between the statistics systems and the application accounting program configured.

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

Insert code into several pages at once (first you place in the page code the places where the links will be located, and then in 1 click you place required block for 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 rates and conversion rates of option A, do not change all blocks, but show option B to a given percentage of visitors).
Show linking blocks designed for the user’s device (depending on the OS used and screen resolution, a block adapted for this device is shown).

If the website engine you use 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 lengthy, so once again briefly about the important:

Previously, the number of inbound links to a site and to a specific page was more important than the quality of content and behavioral factors. Now (at least for Yandex), even a site with zero links can receive visitors if the page is of high quality.
Without external links on Google, it is difficult to get traffic. In many commercial topics, the top 10 are old, inconvenient, but loaded with links.
Yandex also takes into account links in commercial topics.
For purchasing links you can get a filter in both Google and Yandex. A good purchased link is one that you wouldn’t think was purchased.
Internal linking works well for SEO, but it is more justified for large projects where there is a source and a place to put links.
Using internal linking, you can improve the donor page on your website 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 website pages to new ones speed up their placement in search results.
Linking with an emphasis on marketing, rather than SEO, can be calculated very accurately - in money earned.
You need to engage in internal linking with a scientific approach - consider everything and everyone, experiment.
Don’t 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 is there strength in SILO and where did this term come from?

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

Grouping site pages into thematic sections allows search engines to more accurately determine the topics of pages in these groups and the topics of the site as a whole. The optimizer 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 website architecture. “Site architecture” sounds abstruse and immediately seems very complicated. To put it simply, this is what pages to create on the site and why, and how to group them.

Website structure for SEO

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

With this approach:

All possible requests in the site’s niche are collected, non-targeted ones are removed (other cities/countries, not suitable for the type of goods or services, price, etc.).
Requests are divided into groups by text (and partially) by logical match. The quality of the breakdown depends on how much the performer understands the site’s niche. If you don’t understand it 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 sketched out. Very often, the main 10–20 pages have some kind of coherent structure, and the remaining pages are simply published in the “Information”, “Useful materials” or similar section.
These pages are placed on the site, after which promotion comes down to buying links and rarely adding new pages.

The first drawback of this approach is that most often new groups of requests are not collected. The site stops developing 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 a site does not have a clear logical structure, it is very difficult to do normal linking.

If all the pages on a site are piled up, search engines cannot determine the topic 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, also due to the narrow specialization of the site or its section.

The third drawback of such a scheme is the quality of the pages itself, but this is a topic for a separate article. In short, in most cases it is impossible to create a page that will qualitatively answer 40–50 queries, especially if some of them are commercial, and some are informational.

How do search engines determine the structure of a website?

Search engines can determine the topic of a single page on a website. 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/sezon
site-name /legkovie/sezon/letnie
site-name /legkovie/sezon/zimnie

With this site structure, search engines understand very well which pages more accurately answer the user’s request. And you will get more or less correct linking within one group of pages automatically. The most important pages will be included in the main or additional menu; the nesting of pages will be indicated by “breadcrumbs” - navigation through sections of the site and their hierarchy. Here's an example:

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

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

In this case, it is enough to simply “pump up” the necessary pages with internal links - for example, by placing a “top sales”, “best rated” or similar block in the category with links to the necessary pages. This applies not only to online stores. Here's from another niche:

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

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

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

In this case, search engines are likely to identify the most significant pages based on 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 of internal links.

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

Based on 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 all others link to it).

The main inconvenience of such a site layout is the difficulty in building the site structure due to interlinking. Here's what John Mueller, a Google webmaster specialist, says about this:

And changing the structure of the site may take time and not bear fruit. So unless you have obvious confusion with the structure, it is better to just continue working.

Site structure for people

When creating a site structure “for SEO,” all possible user requests are found and groups of pages are created for these requests. When creating a website for people, the situation is the opposite. A site structure is created that covers 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 of the target audience.
Pages will be linked to each other primarily not by semantics, but by user needs. This makes it possible to bring a visitor to the site at any stage from choosing a product/service to choosing where to buy.
Due to the coherence of the pages, there are better behavioral factors on the site - greater viewing depth, more time on the site.

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

1. Construction of houses from timber

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 you can create such a group of pages on a website if you think about the user’s needs:

Here you can 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; there would be something to show on them. Such a group of pages will collect traffic for hundreds of queries, from low-frequency to high-frequency ones. And if, for SEO purposes, you need to “transfer” weight to one of the pages, you can do this; it will be enough to add linking 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 grow like a snowball. For example:

Differences between laminated and profiled timber, advantages and disadvantages.
What type of foundation can be used when building a two-story house made of timber.
What is included in the construction of a turnkey log house?

2. Online store of construction materials

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

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

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

Now the question is - have you seen this somewhere? So far I have only seen in directories 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 SEO.

3. City portal

Typically, a city portal is a collection of news, a catalog of organizations, posters of various events, and other things. It's easy to make your site more useful to users and get internal links to the right pages. It is enough to display the data in a format useful to the user:

Not just a list of kindergartens or schools - but by area and stop.
Any services like food delivery are divided into 24-hour and non-24-hour services.
Events 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 2/3/4 year old child in Moscow”, “where to go with a girl at night in Moscow” and others.

How does the structure of a people site help you find site ideas and improve conversions?

The “site structure for people” approach can be perfectly combined with a marketing approach. This works in niches with large checks, with a long path from visitor to client. Companies that are the first to learn how to build a page structure in such a way as to direct a future client to the desired stage before making a sale will sooner or later overtake their competitors. Or they won’t let their competitors get ahead of them.

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 are needed?
Should I order the design and construction separately or not? Which is better and why?
What shape 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?
Which foundation is suitable?
What are the walls made of?
If there are several floors, what kind of floors should be used?
What is the roof made of?
How many cameras should there be in a double-glazed window?

This is only part of the stages of building a “box”. Each of these points can be “expanded” into another similar 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, I can offhand name 7 or 8 wall materials (brick, shell rock, aerated concrete, timber, vulture panels, cinder block, thermal house, foam concrete). Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. If the company is only engaged in construction, you can safely create a cluster of pages, professionally comparing all these materials.

And it will be very useful material. And visitors willingly follow the links between such pages. 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 that of competitors.

Such pages increase trust in the company and can generate leads. A subscription form of the form “Indicate your email and phone number and receive comparative characteristics of the top 10 wall materials in 3 minutes” will generate applications from potential clients.

This approach will not allow you to miss pages that might have been 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, conversion is higher. If you are reading this article, you probably have a website. Imagine that you are not satisfied with your current hoster (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:

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

Most likely, the second one. And this works in any niche where most customers make a choice rather than being driven by the wow effect.

Site structure and promotion

The structure of the site and linking greatly influence the position of the site. Of course, if the site meets the basic requirements:

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

How to more or less correctly compare the effectiveness of promoting a large website that is trying to cover the entire topic, and a small, narrowly focused project that compete on a group of requests? If you don’t know 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:

Data for all sites is taken from the same services, so the errors are approximately the same for all. Competition – the percentage of queries for which sites intersect in the top 10. This 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 selected sites with less than 1,000 pages in the Yandex and Google index:

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 trade activities to 1C, but only about everything for individual entrepreneurs.
The site does not sell 100,500 types 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 websites with a narrower theme have hundreds of times more visitors per page than their larger competitors?

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

Pages on such sites are usually interconnected and provide more information.. Where on a large project there will be 1 page, on a small one there will be several interconnected in a cluster or group. Moreover, 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 point, 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 series of materials that are conveniently interconnected than if they are just links to transfer the weight of pages.

Many topics have their own slang or specialized terms. Small thematic sites are many times superior in semantic coverage to large ones. Like that:

So it turns out that small sites, with well-designed pages, with cool 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 a logical website structure?

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 page of the site should see a simple and understandable next step, 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 your cart either from the product card, or sometimes from the category. This means that all user paths through the site need to be structured so that they end up either in a category or in a product card. In the example above, a popular article can be referenced by 10 categories, an article (or several), and neighboring articles.

And the remaining pages that do not directly sell a product or service link to selling pages. This could be a question-answer section, reference information, comparison pages, blog articles, news.

On small sites (10–100 pages) everything is 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-sized sites (up to 10,000 pages) Typically, either a catalog structure is implemented (if it is an online store) or categories. The pages are arranged in groups (headings, categories), each page of the group links to other pages of the same heading. For SEO, the most important categories and pages are linked to from other relevant categories.

On large portals (with hundreds of thousands and millions of pages) either an 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 up pages with internal links selectively if there are some pages that give the main result (selling something).
Often the traffic is event-based, or even one-time. This is especially true for news resources - you just need to post more news and do it faster.

Site URL structure

Today, it makes 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 - Home page/category/sub-category/sub-sub-category/ sub-sub-sub-category/page/page-option

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

The second approach is that all site pages can be nested at 2–4 levels:

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 be in one category, and the remaining pages simply display lists for the convenience of users. For example, all products are located at site/tovarN100500, and categories are like:

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

They are simply listings of goods according to specified 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 that there is a lot of work either with the head or with the hands. The products themselves will not appear in the category; you will need to include them manually, or think through display 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 page/poroda/haski,” and links to it can be displayed on dozens of other project pages:

Home page/srednie-sobaki/
Home page/krasivie-sobaki/
Home page/sobaki-dlya-semei-s-detmi/

Which internal linking option should I choose?

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

The first is that 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 is that 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 (towards the page blocks).

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

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

In my opinion, this option (or adapting it to suit your business) provides maximum flexibility. In the example above, a specific model went out of production and sale and was replaced with a similar one. And in more conservative topics, in a year or two you can add dozens and hundreds of internal links to the main selling pages.

How to organize data storage on the site?

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

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

Each link leads to the corresponding section of Yandex.Market. Of course, on the Internet, 1000+ articles are a drop in the bucket. 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 for the owner of an online store or thematic site. And the 2,000 articles for the example on the right almost certainly cost several million rubles (or rather the amount with 7 zeros).

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

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

Characteristics of goods or services. Everything that can be considered a characteristic must be stored in a format that will allow you to obtain complete information automatically. For example, if you sell wallpaper, all characteristics like “plain color”, “with a large pattern”, “white wallpaper”, “with a black pattern” and other options should be assigned to the corresponding articles. So that you can create a category “white wallpaper with a black pattern” in a couple of clicks by simply adding up the characteristics.

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

Here's another good example:

Think broadly – the more possible target audience groups you can reach, the more visitors and sales you will receive.

Content marketing works best in the long run. Search algorithms change from year to year, and every month a new wow technology is released that “should disrupt the market and take a significant share of sales.” And projects that systematically work to produce quality content are simply growing 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). Look how many visitors projects dedicated to technology receive. Technology becomes obsolete every year, but leading portals and many newcomers are quietly gathering their share of the audience.

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

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

Consider the effectiveness right away. Analyze your competitors and make forecasts.

What to do if you have a small project?

Many of the techniques mentioned earlier can be easily implemented in online stores or catalog sites. But what if you have a small project with a narrow topic? A universal option is a section with questions and answers.

Don't make everything one page. Separate question - separate page.
Give useful answers. Pages “for SEO” with answers like “you can find out by calling”, even if they reach the TOP, will not stay there for long. In addition, on pages with little information it is more difficult to place links to other pages on the site.
Make the section convenient. No light gray size 11 fonts. If you yourself are uncomfortable reading such pages, visitors will also be uncomfortable and they will leave.
If there are a lot of questions, make it easy to navigate. Subsections, headings.
Strange advice, but tested in my own 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 the same type. Which is bad for both convenience and SEO.
On the question pages, 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, and standards. If you have few ideas for such sections, look at the most trafficked sites in your niche in big cities. If old projects can still travel due to the link, age of the domain, site trust and other things, young sites have to create cool content.

Why does this generate sales?

If you are looking for “black women's long down jacket with a hood”, you will stay on this page:

And it is in the top 3 for many targeted queries. Including due to linking - on other pages there are links with 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 “wood-like”. And then look in your city for something like “PVC windows %color%%city% price”. And look at the results in a very competitive niche. Yes, at least in Moscow:

Even the screenshot shows that the price of windows with a colored profile is 40% higher. Such a request can be perfectly processed in the “question-answer” section; you can create a separate page with standard sizes and prices. And the buyer will call if everything suits him. And such pages can pump up links to other pages. A total benefit, overall.

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

How to do proper website linking - checklist

If you already have a site with a large number of pages, I can only advise the obvious - consider the weight of the pages and link to the most important pages from the rest. This is the easiest and most painless way to lose 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 requests should be placed on sales 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 search results, this is bad. If there is such a thing, combine it into one page and set up redirection from the remote page.
When working with internal links, the ratio from point 4 can be ignored; there is only one rule - do not go overboard with anchors. It is better to enter an incomplete query naturally than to enter a complete one unnaturally.
Avoid broken links on the site; if you have a lot of them, you are “spilling” 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. If you need to put several links, you can close unnecessary links in scripts.
Clicked links convey more weight than just links.
The link should look like a link (eg different color, underline, hover effect) if it is text.
The accepting page may be demoted for having too unnatural internal link environment. Therefore, it is better to use constructions of 2-3-4 words, which are not repeated frequently 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 up” important pages with JS scripts with various ways to hide 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 have not yet seen a single site that would experience significant pessimism for working with internal links if the links there simply provided convenient navigation (and at the same time promoted landing pages).
Use linking blocks that make you want to click on the link.
For a visited project, you can quickly promote new pages for non-competitive requests simply by placing links and receiving transitions within the site. This technique also speeds up the entry of pages into the main search engine index.
When you work with a reference, consider the result. In SEO indicators or money. If you use internal links for marketing purposes, conduct tests and choose the best option.
If you don’t have linking, implement it, you will increase the time on the site and the number of page views.
If your site structure is built not on URLs, but on links, try to link within 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 that important pages receive 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 website) allows you to scan a small website and find broken links in a few minutes. Download, launch. After installation:

To do this, use the combination Ctrl + R. Re-checking errors is necessary because the program could have made a mistake - at the time of checking, the link could be unavailable, although in fact everything is in order. This can happen due to a momentary failure of the site, or due to the server taking too long to respond. If after re-checking the errors remain, check what is wrong. In order to open a page with a broken link you need to:

Explanation:

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 indicates the page (or pages) on which this 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?

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

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

Windows and doors in the bathhouse are made smaller than in ordinary residential premises: this makes it easier to retain heat. Doors are usually single-leaf and open outward.

Bathhouse doors can be made in different ways. One of the options is a door made of boards, upholstered on the outside with some kind of insulation, and covered on the inside with drying oil, thin waterproof plywood or fiberboard.

Another option for a bathhouse is comfortable and warm panel doors made from two wooden frames of different sizes (the inner frame should easily fit into the outer one). For a tight fit, the outer frame must strictly correspond to the dimensions of the door jamb, and its edges must be slightly beveled. Both frames are covered with fiberboard on both sides and filled with thermal insulation material. Then the inner frame is inserted into the outer one and secured to it with screws.

In the washing room, you can install a steam- and moisture-resistant door from one frame, attaching fiberglass sheets to it with screws on both sides. The space formed between the sheets is filled with lightweight thermal insulation material.

Locks on doors are usually made at the top and bottom. At the bottom, any metal hook can be used for this purpose, and at the top, the lock should be wooden so as not to get burned.

Door handles are also made of wood. To make them, you can use any available material, even oddly shaped twigs and roots found in the forest. Before installation, door handles are coated with drying oil and dried well.

The windows in the bathhouse should have the form of horizontally elongated rectangles, since it is this shape that allows for better heat retention in the room. Windows can be made both in walls and in doors. The area of the bath window may vary depending on the view opening, but, as a rule, it does not exceed 5-7% of the floor area. The window is positioned so that you can look out of it while sitting or lying in the steam room or standing in the washing room.

With both double and single frames, the windows in the bathhouse must have double sealed glazing (on a single frame, glass is attached to both sides). It is difficult to make a window in such a window, but it greatly facilitates the ventilation of the bathhouse.

In brick baths, it is advisable to make windows from glass blocks. They provide soft diffused light, do not require curtains, are more hygienic and durable than ordinary ones.

For artificial lighting of baths, sealed anti-fog lamps of yellow and milky color are usually used.

To ensure good ventilation, a vent is made above the top shelf - a small rectangular or round hole in the wall. It is closed with a removable plug made of a piece of wood upholstered in soft material with a handle or a sliding wooden flap.

For the same purpose, a supply ventilation hole is made at the bottom of the door or near the stove at a height of 25-50 cm from the floor. It should also be closed with a flap or valve.

The next stage of the internal equipment of the bathhouse is the manufacture of shelves in the steam room. If the bathhouse is spacious, there may be 2 or 3 shelves.

The top one is made the widest, on which they usually soar while lying down; the lower ones should be a little narrower. Place the shelves one above the other or in the letter “G” ( last option suitable for baths with a combined steam room and washing room).

To make it comfortable to steam while sitting on the top shelf, the distance from it to the ceiling should be 115-120 cm, and between the top and middle shelves - 40 cm. The bottom shelf is usually made at a height of 20-25 cm from the floor. In addition, it is necessary to take into account that the top shelf should be at least 50-100 cm higher than the top stones of the stove.

The best shelves are made from linden, aspen or poplar boards: they are pleasant to the body, dry quickly and do not contain resins.

They make shelves on frames from beams, placing the boards across the frame so that there is a small gap. In this case, the boards are secured with stainless screws from the side of the beams so that their heads do not burn the body.

For greater convenience, the upper and middle shelves can be made removable on stationary supports, and the lower one can be made in the form of a portable bench.

However, do not forget that all elements of this equipment, even the smallest ones, must have a convexity or a slight slope for unhindered swelling of water.

It is also necessary to take care of the little things that will help create maximum comfort in the bathhouse: wooden grates on the floor, shelves for bath accessories, footrests.

You should not paint or varnish wooden surfaces in a bathhouse, as the wood will immediately lose its warmth and its pleasant natural appearance.

Ceiling

The ceiling in the bathhouse should also be insulated, in addition, care should be taken to impregnate the rafters and beams, as they will constantly be exposed to high temperatures and humidity. Insulation materials can be of various types (glass wool, mineral wool, polystyrene foam, foam rubber). The main thing is that they are fire safe and sufficiently resistant to rotting.

Before hemming the ceiling, which in a bathhouse is usually made of planed boards, you should line the space between the roof and the ceiling with a vapor barrier material. This can be a special material or simply plastic film. But now the bathhouse is built, and you can’t wait to check how warm it retains. Such a test fire will allow you to identify all the shortcomings of your work, and, since the construction is not yet completed, quickly correct them.

Do-it-yourself bathhouse. Interior decoration (video):

Hello friends. Today I want to talk to you about competent internal linking of websites, and not just any websites, but specifically online stores. Once upon a time, when I was only working on my own informational sites, I would have started talking about content developers, but now the guys and I in the studio are working only on commercial sites, and 80% of them are online stores.

All stores are unique in their own way: different themes, engines, structures, different visions of a “convenient” website on the part of the owner. And each site has 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 have provided examples of bad techniques and what not to do.

I described each linking option in detail, why it is important and how to implement it correctly. Well, for now, 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 quickly and easily find the right product or service and get to the right page. Linking a site helps search robots quickly index and re-index pages and correctly distribute static weight between them.

User interests are a priority when linking, after all, it is impossible for buyers to be shown dissimilar products in a block of similar products, or in a block of related products when buying a refrigerator, to show other refrigerators, or, for example, car tires. Everything should be in order: conversion and sales come first, 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, linking should ideally solve the following problems:

Assistance in navigation for visitors;
Speeding up and improving indexing;
Transferring static link juice to the desired pages;
There's probably something else, but it just 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 rel=”nofollow” attribute. Otherwise, the weight will flow away from the donor page, but will not be added to the acceptor page, that is, it will simply evaporate.
The rel=”nofollow” attribute must be used in cases where the link leads to a non-indexed page, but this link is necessary. Accordingly, there is no need to force the robot to follow the link and waste time and crawling 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 the url pointing to the last post in the forum topic, which is not indexed. Ideally, you should get rid of such links using JS, as I already wrote about, the method still works.
Links should always lead to indexed pages of the site, otherwise the story described in point No. 1 above will repeat.
Even when placing internal links, you should use unique anchors when linking. Most likely, this rule is applicable in online stores only for the information section, if it exists, and for links entered manually. Other links from menus, blocks, filters, tags, etc. cannot be changed dynamically, and there is no need to, because their purpose is simply to be a reference that conveys static weight.
There are no restrictions or recommendations on the number of internal links on site pages. People often ask me, I heard somewhere that more than 150 internal links on a page is very bad, what should I do? Who said this, where this information came from - I don’t know. But I know for sure that everything depends on the specific site and the specific situation. The most important thing to consider is user convenience; there should be exactly as many links as a visitor to 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 strictly to your landing pages. This means that following the link should return a 200 OK response. I’m not saying that broken links are unacceptable, that’s obvious, but I’m saying that links should go without (and if there’s not a 301, but a 302 redirect, then it’s a total disaster). It’s not uncommon that when the structure is changed, or due to the fault of the layout designer (forgot the slash at the end of the link, for example), internal links go through a redirect, which is very difficult to track by eye. Everyone should definitely run their website at least once with a crawler, for example, or any other tool.

I would be grateful if you tell me in the comments anything else for this section from your practice. Well, I move on to describing schemes and methods for 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 believe that cross-cutting elements of a site, in particular menus, are not taken into account by search engines, or are taken into account very poorly, because are present on every page and their absence/presence changes little.

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

On the Technosila website the menu is just 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 textual component, so that the menu does not end up in the snippet on search results, so that it does not interfere with determining 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 much more often the description content is taken as a snippet and problems with low-quality snippets rarely arise.

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

Menu in the footer. You don’t have to do anything with the menu in the footer, you don’t have to close it in any way, and you don’t have to worry about weight leaking onto the technical pages. As for the content, I like how it is implemented in the examples above. The menu contains contact information, social networks, as well as links to important information pages: payment, delivery, about the company, etc. It makes sense to duplicate navigation through product sections in the footer only if there are no more than 5-7 of these sections (that is, as on the vcedetyam.ru website, you DO NOT need to do it.)

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 this and is it necessary? Alternatively: do not display in the menu full list categories, subcategories, subsubcategories, etc. And limit yourself to displaying only the parent sections. To make it clear, I’ll show you with an example: let’s take the Eldorado website, the “Electronics” menu item, it now has about 100 links, but it was possible to display only 6 (TVs, Computers, Phones, Software, Photos and Videos and Automotive Products), that is, exclude child elements. But there is also a downside - the lack of detail will confuse visitors; for example, will you be able to immediately determine where to look for faxes, memory cards or headphones? Me not. So this option for “losing weight” on 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 may sound:), and it is advisable to test your hypotheses with some kind of A/B test.

Based on practice, I can say that manipulating links does not give any tangible SEO results. I tried removing and adding links, I tried closing links in JS - this had absolutely no effect on positions and traffic.

Breadcrumbs as a linking element

The next integral element of any website, and especially an online store, is breadcrumbs. The usefulness of this element is difficult to overestimate; the crumbs carry an informational and navigational meaning: by 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 crumbs include the same categories and sections as in the navigation menu. In other cases, the crumbs may contain links to SEO filters from a certain category, which are generated by linking a product category with some property or characteristic. In this case, the breadcrumb link allows such filter pages to be indexed.

With breadcrumbs there are both clear and not so simple solutions:

Indexing. I am absolutely sure that there is no need to hide crumbs from indexing using noindex and/or rel=”nofollow”. Having opened a dozen well-known shopping sites, I also did not see a single case of a ban on indexing.

schema.org markup. It's worth marking bread crumbs. This will affect the beauty of the snippet on Google, although, unfortunately, it will not give anything functional. (If you remember, previously 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.

Availability of the current page in the navigation. Frequently asked question, display or not display the name/title of the current page on which the user is located in the navigation chain. I believe that the title of the current page should be displayed as a title in a 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 for yourself what you like best. By the way, on the websites of Technosila and MVideo there are crumbs without the name of the product, but on DNS and Eldorado the name of the product is present.

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

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

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

Another element that is used everywhere is similar products and recommendations. This block of links, no matter what it is called and what functionality it has - 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 the console, a bracket for the TV, a mouse pad - all this is to sell an additional product, and not for SEO.

This is a link only formally. If we talk about SEO, then we need some more technical/algorithmic approach to linking, one of such 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 had come up with it 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 mentions on the Internet earlier than my posts about linking and modules. But this is absolutely not important now.

The main task of circular linking is to distribute weight evenly between pages of the same level. The main marker in in this case is the id of the page in the database. That is, there is a sequential 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 closes, 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 pages from the index from the chain does not break the algorithm, because we link to 10 pages at once. I think you understand the principle of operation.

I made modules for circular linking for my information and entertainment sites and tested them only there, but theoretically this should work for any site with a large number of pages. According to my experiments, this gave an amazing result: thanks to this linking, 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 cannot be any talk of any similarity between pages or products if the selection is simply based on id from the database. To do this, in the module I came up with restrictions that at least somehow solved this problem - 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 breaking 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 that uses ring linking - www.haldi.ru. You can see an example by going to the page of any product and scrolling down to the “Other products” block.

To maintain the similarity of products, a restriction was made on the removal of products from the common parent category. As you can see, there is still no need to talk about similarity. In general, the site is quite interesting in terms of SEO, many different teams were involved in its promotion (including my team), so I recommend you study it.

To summarize, 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 linking, when there is a certain block in which links to N random pages are displayed. Links can be either dynamic, that is, each time you visit a page, the set of links changes, 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 link pages based on referral search queries. If you remember, about 6 years ago there was an HTracer script that pulled the page address and search query from the referrer, if the transition was made from a search engine and saved to the database, then a block with links was formed on the site pages, which in the anchor contained the keyword for which there was a transition from the search. There was also a module for DLE, it seems it was called “Transitions” and had similar functionality. Soon, search engines filtered sites using a similar linking scheme, quite rightly regarding this as search spam. I wanted to find a live example for you or take a screenshot, but I didn’t find a single site with such a scheme, even among Warez sites, not to mention online stores.

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

Linking from category/product descriptions

Another useless activity, in my opinion, is placing links 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 this, realizing that only a SEO specialist could go to the site with the request “buy a 4K TV” and become interested in the text, not the goods :) Isn’t it? Consequently, there is no benefit for visitors from links from the description, and I don’t see any SEO benefit from links from the description on the scale of a large site. I’m talking about SEO benefits because I had to put such links in my work and I can say that I have never seen any effect from them.

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

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

Anchors for “book”, “because”, “time”! This is crazy, they just do a word search from the description that matches the book title and link. They also link to the main page and key sections. You can go around the site and look at it.

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

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

Linking from information 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 information articles are shown instead of product pages. A striking example from my practice is the theme of stores for adults (sex shop, it so happens that we work a lot with them), just for fun, enter “vibrator” in Yandex and look at the results. Sometimes the only option to get into the top is to create a high-quality information 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 perfection, even unique texts were written on each page. In my experience there simply has not been a more developed site, I’m serious. But the traffic stubbornly refused to go to commercial pages. When I collected SYNOPSIS, I did not delete information queries, but clustered them and put them in a separate group, and in the end I got about 50 topics for future publications. Since the site already had an articles section, we immediately began to slowly fill it. To my surprise, information requests began to shoot into the top 1-top 3 of Yandex and Google. As a result, the traffic on the site was increased to 700-900 visitors per day, and only 15-20% of the traffic went to commercial pages. Of course, we linked the articles to the relevant product categories and filters (no more than 3-4 links per publication).

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

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

There is another example in our practice, this time positive. For certain categories of products, next to the characteristics and descriptions, links to instructions for installation and care of the product are displayed. Judging by the behavior, these pages are useful to customers; they read them and save them as pdfs. We even recorded videos for the most popular pages. Instructions rank well in searches and generate clicks. Knowing this, we placed product informers on them. As a result, several dozen orders are 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 jerk off not to anchors and the number of internal links, but to something more pleasant :) Well, you understand...

Another good example of an information page with product informers and multiple links on Yandex.Market. I understand that it’s very strange to focus on Yandex in terms of SEO, but it’s worth focusing on in terms of 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 (the post about clusterizers was written a long time ago, you can imagine how many more of them have appeared since then).

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

Advanced agencies and studios have been practicing SEO filters for several years, and the network has already accumulated quite a few sites with deep semantics. In Moscow and other large cities, everything is polished in competitive topics; there, the use of tagging is no longer an innovation that puts you ahead of your competitors, but rather an attempt to keep up. It’s easier in the regions, thoughtful SEO beats out competitors, but this will come to an end.

Six months ago there were rumors that Yandex was going to punish for the senseless and unjustified generation of such SEO filters, as for low-quality and useless pages (remember the times of the AGS). But the case died 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 already said, SEO filters are usually obtained from a combination of product category and some properties. The most common example of a filter is brands. The easiest way to imagine this is using the example of household appliances, for example, televisions, where links with brands have a higher frequency than the general request without a brand. Next come the properties inherent in a certain product category, in the case of TVs these are: matrix type (LED, OLED, LCD, plasma), resolution (Full HD, 4K, 8K), technologies (3D, Smart TV, Android), type (curved , with backlight), etc. It is very easy to extract such filters from product specifications, or to extract “popular filters” from Wordstat. Cross filters often work - for example, linking properties with brands - Samsung 4k TV, Philips TV with Ambilight.

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

The Technopark online store is generally a nerd about filters. All filters in the sidebar are clickable and go to the corresponding highly searched pages. There is no other way, competition is tough!

There are less elegant solutions, just a random set of links to filters 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 and talked about links from the filter block in categories. It’s not difficult to find examples of implementation - take any site from the top in Moscow for a general request.
Personally, I think we need to go further and do what no one else is doing. I persistently scrolled through the TOP50 in Moscow for electronics and did not find a single example of what I wanted to show you - links to SEO tags from product characteristics. Apart from our clients, I can only remember one site where I saw a decent implementation, this is SotMarket, which slipped into complete shit, turning into a doorway. However, remnants of its former glory are still there:

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

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

Verdict: linking is good!

You have read a large post with tips and live examples, and I wanted to end here, but I decided that it would be wrong to just take and leave you alone with your thoughts, questions and, possibly, doubts. So let's put together some summary + short answers to questions that weren't discussed:

It can be stated with absolute certainty improving indexing due to linking– often pages are not indexed or fall out of the index as being of insufficient quality; in fact, they simply lack weight, and this weight will be given to them by internal links.

Number of links for linking it doesn’t matter - there is no precisely defined number of links from a page that would be considered normal. There should be exactly as many links as will be enough for live site visitors to navigate the site comfortably. Go to the metrics web viewer and view several dozen records of visitor behavior. You will be surprised by the results!

How does internal linking affect positions? Not directly. But thanks to interlinking, pages are confidently kept in the index, and due to greater static weight, the page should rank better for all target queries, but not separately for any 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 were a lot of conversations on this topic and, it seemed, they came to a logical conclusion: if the pages of product cards have the greatest traffic potential, then we should try to distribute all the weight on them, if categories, then try to link to categories as much as possible from product cards. Let me give you an example: when buying a laptop or phone, most people ask for a specific model of laptop or phone, so product cards have the greatest potential. If a person is looking for wallpaper, for example, he is unfamiliar with the article numbers or names of specific wallpaper collections, he searches for “buy wallpaper,” adding at most a color or property to the request (vinyl, non-woven, paintable). IN in this example Categories, subcategories and SEO filters have potential. It is absolutely clear what types of pages need to be promoted, but 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 described, without changing them in any way depending on the type of pages being promoted.

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

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