Cross Linking Between Posts: The Good and the Bad

Cross link between your own posts/pages can be beneficial for your blog but at the same also brings some disadvantages. To maximize its benefits you should know its pitfalls so as to avoid them.

The Good

Cross linking benefits you in two ways: it helps you SEO-wise and helps your readers find related more easily. For the SEO part, cross linking is good because it helps establish relevancy between posts and pages. Pages containing related topics will, of course, be the ones linked to each other. Just make sure the anchor text for the links contain the keywords you need to help search engines know what the pages’ topics are.

When it comes to helping your readers, cross linking to older related posts will not only make access to these posts a whole lot easier for readers but will actually encourage them to stay on your blog longer.

The Bad

There are two things to avoid when cross linking: doing it excessively and misleading readers.

Linking excessively to your own posts can make you look either desperate or irritating. The main reason for linking to older posts should be to help readers find something of value to them and not just be means for self-promotion. That said, link only when it will provide value to your readers.

Misleading readers is even worse in my book. This happens when the anchor text you use is such that it makes readers think that they’ll be routed to an external page that’s the source of your post but instead gets routed to another post on the same topic. I hate it when that happens. It looks greedy because you’re caging readers in even when pointing them to an external page will help them find further information they need.

By Sparky in Basics, Hyperlinks, Keywords, Linking

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