How to Fix Pages With Only One Internal Link
How to Fix Pages With Only One Internal Link Let’s talk about pages that have only one incoming link and pages that take more than three clicks to be reached. I’m going to cover both of these in this video and post because they’re fairly similar and there’s a good chance that if you see any one of these issues in your audit, you’re most likely to have the other issue as well.
But first, let’s discuss briefly why this is an issue conceptually. When you encounter this issue, it’s most likely because you have pages that are buried on your website.
What this means is that there are pages on your site that are not easy or simple to get to for users.
These can be old blog posts, pages that you’ve removed links to, or pages that don’t have many ways to get into when navigating the rest of your website.
When you have these types of pages, Google will think that you’re trying to spam the system or tricking it to get a higher ranking because it resembles some old black hat SEO techniques.
You want to avoid this as much as possible to prevent being penalized by Google.
The first step that you’d want to do is to look at pages that have only one incoming link. If you’re working with WordPress, this is not uncommon. It’s common for websites built on WordPress to have blog posts with only one incoming link.
Take a look at the URLs that are being reported in SEMRush and in this case, you can see these are all blog entries.
Now, if you have a URL here that is not a blog, and it’s the main page, then you probably are going to want to go through and look to see why you only have one inbound link to that page. And then you want to ask yourself, is that an important page?
We’ll discuss in a while what you need to do in case that is an important page. For now, let’s talk about what to do with blog posts that have this issue.
Here is an example of a homepage of a blog and you can see there is some navigation at the top of the page.
These are different blog categories. And by selecting one of the categories, the blogs that are included change beneath it.
But if we were to go back to the homepage for a second and count the number of clicks to get to those blog pages, it would take at least three or more clicks to get there. If you scroll all the way down, not all the blog posts are going to be present on this page.
So automatically some of these blog posts are getting to be a little more buried. We’ve clicked twice, and we still would need to click a third time to get to these older blog posts.
And if you have lots of old blog posts or have several pages worth of all old blog posts, you can see that automatically those are going to take at least three clicks to get to. But that’s just the way WordPress is built.
These blog posts are also only going to have one inbound link but that is not really the issue. More importantly, what you need to think about is the pages that are difficult to reach are important for your site.
Most of the time, hard-to-reach pages are blog posts, and sometimes they can be regular posts. If it’s a blog post, I wouldn’t worry about it as much. But if it’s the main page of your site, you’re going to want to consider it as this could be an important page.
If you think it is an important page, there’s one thing you should do before you do anything else and that’s going to Google Analytics.
Log in to your Google Analytics account and make sure your website is connected. The dashboard looks roughly like this. Scroll down to the left-hand side where it says Behavior.
Click on that and then beneath that drop-down under Site Content, go to Landing Pages. Once you’re looking at the landing pages, extend the date for at least the previous year.
Simply adjust the date to go back a year, go down and look at the list of pages. You can expand this so you see more than 10 at a time.
Look for the page in question. Check whether anyone has landed on that page coming directly from somewhere outside your website in the past year.
If your page is listed here, you probably don’t want to just get rid of it. But if your page is not listed here at all, you can most likely then just delete it.
Once you spot the page that you’re looking for in the list, click on it to see the trend of the visits coming into that page.
If the page is getting a lot of visitors or at least a consistent stream of traffic, I would probably not get rid of this page.
If you have this page in your three clicks to reach or if it has only one inbound link, consider trying to create some additional ways to reach that page. We’ll go over in a second.
If you have a traffic pattern coming into a landing page that looks like this where it only has a few visits and it hasn’t happened for a while, decide whether you should get rid of this page or create more ways for it to become more reachable.
To create more ways to reach a page within WordPress, you just need to create some additional navigation.
You can do this via categories and tags. Blog posts within WordPress always have a category and tag. You want to create categories and tags and such ways that you don’t have dozens of each.
You don’t need to have a dozen tags and a hundred categories but try to make it useful. A handful of categories and a couple of dozen tags should be enough. These should provide your users with an easier way to navigate your site so that all your pages are accessible within just a few clicks or by clicking on a category.
By doing this, you’ll get a shorter list of blog posts. In this case, these are actually categories in the top navigation.
Another way to do it would be to have a list on the side of the page with your categories, tags or recent posts displayed.
If you have a non-blog page or a regular page on your website that is taking more than three clicks to reach or has only one inbound link, you want to think about somehow getting that page into navigation. Whether it’s in the top navigation, a drop-down, or within the footer.
A lot of times a website will list the majority of its pages within the footer. If it’s a page that you don’t want to include in the navigation then you want to go through and click on individual pages that link to the page in question and try to just include more than one.
Again, you really just want to ask yourself the question “Is this page that is either three clicks deep or has only one inbound link, important?”
And if it is, you want to create some links to it. It’s really basically that simple. If it’s not important and it has no inbound traffic from Google analytics as I showed you, then you can probably just get rid of that page and be sure to place a redirect.