: Internal links for a website I heard I have to keep internal links with relevant anchor texts on a website to just a few because too many internal links might "confuse" the bots. So generally

@Gloria169

In addition to John Conde's answer, I'd add the following points:


You should try and keep the anchor text consistent on links to the same page - this strengthens that term for the linked page.
The only time you should use nofollow on internal links is if they are to pages you really don't want indexed (say admin pages, sign-up, etc) or to "duplicated" content - for example if your site creates URLs for tags, sometimes you might want to exclude them from search results as the content is the same as the post page - however these should be backed up with noindex meta on the linked pages so direct entry doesn't index them either - these are the sort of links that could cause very large loops, so it's advisable to restrict them.

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@Pope3001725

Whomever told you this is wrong.


Only use nofollow on links that you don't trust. These links are usually provided by third parties (i.e. blog comments) and may be spammy. Otherwise, do not use nofollow. After all, Matt Cutts said linking to external sites can be a positive ranking factor.
Using nofollow on internal links is a bad idea. PageRank is still passed to those pages but is then discarded since the links are nofollow. This only hurts you and never helps you. This includes using nofollow on links to sign up forms, contact pages, etc. Those pages still have value to you as they can "pass" PR around your site as well as use internal links to your benefit. (Matt Cutts clearly states that using nofollow on internal links is a bad idea).
There is no such thing as too many internal links confusing the search engines. Although there is an upper limit to how many links should be on a page, it only is because search engines will only read and parse up to a certain amount of content before it stops. So unless you have over a hundred links or so don't try to minimize your internal links.
Internal links are a big tool for SEO. They count as "votes" and pass PR to your other internal pages. The anchor text used also is very helpful for your page's rankings.


Wikipedia is a great example of internal linking at its best. Every article links to every other article relevant to that topic at hand. The can be dozens of internal links on one page. Those links a big reason why Wikipedia ranks so well. (The fact that they have a lot of incoming links doesn't hurt, either).

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