Content Strategy Tool to only count internal links in the body of a page

[Dan-Toast]

Currently, if your central topic page is in either your top level or footer nav then no matter what page you put in as a subtopic, it will show that there is a link.

This is because it's scanning the whole page source for the link, when in hindsight, to properly optimise your topic you need to have a link from the body of your subtopic to your pillar page, using varying anchor text across all of the subtopics.

It would be good if the tool only counted internal links if they were in the body of the page.

[#2]

Hi @Dan-Toast,

I was just wondering about this because all our blogposts seem to be linked to our pillar pages but I think it's because of the navigation bar. Do you know if google also takes nav bars as links or is the Hubspot tool misleading?

Thanks!

Cristina

[#3]

Hi Cristina,

To answer your question, Google reads any link on the page, whether that's in the nav, content or footer - unless it's has a nofollow tag. 

So in terms of how this impacts your SEO, it is generally assumed in the SEO community that in-content links matter more than any other internal links. Google did actually confirm this in one of their hangouts too.

Plus, content internal links serve the main connection between pillar pages with related content. Then, once the crawler comes to your site, it will see a web of pages that show your expertise in a particular field.

At the same time, navigation links do pass some SEO value. However, you need to keep in mind that their SEO value is lowered simply because their main function is not to connect your related content but to provide a handy shortcut to your key pages.

So, really the HubSpot tool is slightly misleading and would be much better if it just showed links in the content of your page, rather than the navigation.

[#4]

That makes sense, thank you! And I agree - the tool would be so much better that way.