The concern over linking has not died down at all in recent months. A recent question submitted to Google's John Mueller over a Google+ Hangout asked about linking.
The question was, it is considered "over optimization" when you have articles on your e-commerce site and you link from those articles to products in your store?
The question was asked at the 17:12 mark and reads:
Some time ago our SEO agency got us to remove our internal links from our articles on our eCommerce site as google can see this as over optimization. From what I have read , this may not be the case. Can you please clarify the googles position on this?
Google's John Mueller said in general, this is not a problem. He said:
In general, I don’t see any problems with internal links from articles on an e-commerce site. So if you are an expert on a topic, and you have products that belong to that topic, then maybe you will write some articles about this topic as well and give more insight on why you chose those products to sell, or the pros and cons, the variations of those products, and that is useful content to have. And that is something that sometimes does make sense to link to your product pages or the rest of your site.So that is not something I’d see as being overly problematic. If this is done in a reasonable way, that you are not linking every keyword to different pages on your site, but rather saying this product is important, this product is important here, this is something we offer, this is something someone else offers, this is a link to the manufacturer directly. Then that is useful information to have, that is not something I’d remove.
I love and hate how there is so much concern about how you add links to your own site, it bothers me a lot.
Here is the video snippet:
Forum discussion at Google+.
This post was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today. Have a happy, healthy and sweet new year!
