Internal linking is essential both for user navigation and for the optimization of our SEO strategy. The distribution of internal links determines how much strength each URL has within our structure, and knowing how to play with this is key to optimizing our performance in the eyes of Google.

In this article we will review the main elements to take into account when optimizing the internal linking of a classifieds website.

This is a type of website where there is usually a huge amount of products and interrelationships between them.  In these sites, it is necessary to offer a sufficient density of internal links to facilitate user navigation. Also it is necessary to control what we index and what we don't to avoid crawl budget expenses and cannibalization problems, in order to improve the authority transmission to indexable URLs with ranking potential.

What to focus on to improve the internal linking of classifieds sites

Classified websites offer a large number of products structured by category according to verticals. Generally, category URLs display products with a pagination. In this type of pages, there are five elements to pay attention to:

• ‍Breadcrumbs: Breadcrumbs are located at the top of the page and allow our users to navigate vertically on our site. As such, they provide very useful internal links for navigation. As a pro tip: A good breadcrumb structure does not include level 0, or home level, as this internal link is usually found in the logo of the web page.‍
• Facet / Filters: well optimized filters, avoiding duplicates and the creation of empty URLs, allow users to improve the quality of their searches. As far as Google is concerned, a good use of filters can improve the indexation of URL variants with ranking potential.‍
• Sorting: allows us to change the display format of the products that appear on the screen. It does not usually have an SEO impact, so it is important to try to prevent Google from crawling/indexing them by using a combination of noindex/nofollow meta robots.‍
• Pagination: pagination is another way to introduce internal links that make it much easier for users to navigate, in this case in categories with a large number of products.‍
• Popular / related search: These widgets, usually located below the product listing in a category URL of a classifieds website, are essential to create internal links and to improve the authority of certain URLs, either because of their semantic relationship or because of their popularity and/or ranking potential.

To learn in detail how to optimize each of these parts, we invite you to read our free visual guide on internal linking. In it, you can also learn tips and insights about internal linking in ADs URLs on classifieds websites.‍

Best practices for SEO purposes

Once you have identified what are the main elements to take into account when we talk about internal linking in a classifieds website, let's see what will be our goals in an SEO strategy:

• ‍Avoid cannibalization: When there are many products and categories similar to each other it is possible that two or more URLs overlap and aspire to the same Search Intent. In our internal linking strategy we should try to assign in those cases a main URL and use the canonical attribute for the others.
• ‍Avoid unnecessary expenditure of Crawl Budget: Although our website has all kinds of filters for the user, from an SEO perspective we will avoid indexing those URLs resulting from filters, facets or pages whose content is irrelevant, duplicated or non-existent.‍
• Reduce click depth: by smartly utilizing different sections with internal linking, you can reduce the depth levels of relevant URLs, thus improving your SEO performance.‍
• Boost URLs with ranking possibilities in Google: Our internal linking will seek to send more links to all those URLs that correspond to search intentions with potential, for example in the block of related searches, and we will try to deindex or canonicalize the rest of the content that is not relevant for Google. 
  

Check out our dedicated guide to internal linking with Pro-tips and optimization tips

As we have pointed out before, we have created a complete visual guide with all the insights you need to improve your website's internal linking.

In this guide, which you can access here, we analyze internal linking optimization for classifieds websites, but also for other types of websites: eCommerce and Magazines/blogs.

Once you choose the type of website you are interested in, you can visually select the different blocks with internal links and find pro-tips to improve them, warnings and elements to take into account and other insights for SEO optimization.