Too many links?

During a recent discussion on an online webmaster forum, one user spoke of a test he carried out to examine how linking to his homepage affected his search engine optimisation (SEO), it has been reported.

According to online resource Axandra, the webmaster first monitored the effect of internal links - both with and without keywords - carried on the subpages of his website.

Axandra notes that the website was made up of 90 pages of unique content and was ranked top five in Google for its main, second and third keyword phrases.

The webmaster discovered that linking to the content using the same keyword with every page caused a six pages drop in rankings, while doing the same but with keyword variations caused a three page drop.

In addition, linking content from keyword variations was only effective up to a point and there appeared to be a page threshold that if crossed would lead to lower rankings.

However, Axandra suggests that it is difficult to tell if the results are valid as so many variables can influence SEO and it may be more likely that this occurs due to Google's change filter.

Meanwhile, Dev Basu has claimed that targeting needs to be a focus in link requests.

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