Crawl budget can be a real concer

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Kuba Serafinowski: You should make your links count, yes.However, from what you`re saying the website isn`t huge therefore you`re probably not suffering from any crawling capacity issues.If internal links point to desirable pages (e.g. not sorted product listings) then removing them will most likely be a mistake.
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  Sean Clarke: The internal all point to other products. Specifically accessories that come with each product. So lets say we have 300 products and every product comes with the same 2 accessories, we link to those accessories. Having 47, 000 internal links seems excessive.
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  Sean Clarke: We also of course have navigation and footer links that are on every page so those are being counted a large number of times.
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  Kuba Serafinowski: It seems that the accessories are well linked then, should give them a boost.That`s good practice in general.Without a look at the site in question this is mostly speculative, though.
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  Sean Clarke: Kuba Serafinowski the site is https://molinoglass.com The main thing I`m trying to resolve is reducing the internal links in Search console from 47, 000 to (he says 20k).MOLINOGLASS.COMMolinoGlass.comMolinoGlass.com
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  Kuba Serafinowski: Sean if the only reason given is saving crawling budget then with regard to the linked accessories it`s wrong. If you have a desirable page then you want it to be crawled.You may want to get rid of internal links when they are duplicate (eg in header and footer) or they lead to pages you don`t want/need ranking.You need internal links pointing to pages that should drive traffic.Sure, you probably want to have a sane hierarchy like the home page having the most incoming links, then categories, then products etc. but unless this is really skewed somehow then removing those links will only weaken the pages that are now linked.Having 47k internal links says nothing about the "health" of a website in itself and is no indication of anything wrong.Big sites have more pages (10s of millions and more) than you have reported internal links. Does it hurt Amazon or Wikipedia? Nope.
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  Sean Clarke: Kuba Serafinowski I understand this. Actually the accessories that we link to are not actually desirable pages.
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  Kuba Serafinowski: OK then, I`d get rid of them too.I would introduce some form of internal linking among products though to boost some valuable ones e.g. "recommended products" or some such.If you want these links to stay there for some UX reason then SEO-wise to neutralize them you can get rid of and use JS to make these elements act like links.
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  Sean Clarke: Kuba Serafinowski That is what I want.... I`m not a JS guy and I`m struggling to find the code to have JS links instead of a href links. I have some code but it doesn`t open the link in a new tab. Do you have a link to JS code I can use? Thanks!
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  Richard Hearne: Sean Clarke > Having 47, 000 internal links seems excessive.Absolutely NOT.Having 47, 000 different URLs for a limited number of accessories would however be a completely different kettle of fish.
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  Kuba Serafinowski: Sean I`d use an event listener, you can check out this example https://qr.ae/pNzH70Do not add with JS (this is a common mistake and Google can execute JS and will see some of these links).You should also refrain from putting the actual full URL in the code e.g. onclick(URL) as Googlebot can extract URLs from code when they`re not links, too.
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  Sean Clarke: Kuba Serafinowski That unfortunately might as well be written in Russian I`ve tried this but I need the links to open in a new tab document.write(`Facebook`.link(`https://www.facebook.com/molinoglassbongs`));Molino GlassProduct/Service
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  Kuba Serafinowski: I suppose you could ask your devs to implement this, I`m afraid this won`t be as easy to do right as a copy-paste.
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  Sean Clarke: Kuba Serafinowski Unfortunately I am the only dev
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  Rienzi Mosqueda: This is classic internal link optimization. But dont make internal links uncrawlable, instead remove it completely.
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  Sean Clarke: We want the links for users, but don`t want google to crawl them
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  Rienzi Mosqueda: Sean Clarke I dont think nofollow internal links helps with your SEO either. Especially if it’s sitewide.I’m curious to know how your SEO will achieve this.Also, do you need to interlink to all products?
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  Sean Clarke: Rienzi Mosqueda my boss wants us to link to every accessory from each product so that customers can easily find the accessories. I actually don`t think it`s all that necessary but he insists on it.
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  Rienzi Mosqueda: Sean then you have orders. Is not gonna put you at a disadvantage either, SEO.
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  Liew CheonFong: read https://developers.google.com/.../large-site-managing...DEVELOPERS.GOOGLE.COMLarge site owner`s guide to managing your crawl budgetLarge site owner`s guide to managing your crawl budget
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  Sean Clarke: We are nowhere near being a large site. So are you saying we don`t need to worry about this?
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  Liew CheonFong: Sean Clarke I guess you haven`t read the whole page. Read the best practices and monitoring parts. Check Crawl Stats Report https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9679690 don`t need to worry if googlebot has no issue on your siteSUPPORT.GOOGLE.COMCrawl Stats report - Search Console HelpCrawl Stats report - Search Console Help
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  Adam J. Humphreys: As long as there’s breadcrumbs and solid taxonomy with a canonical tag don’t worry about it. Google has a lot of fire power.
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  Sean Clarke: So as I understand things having 47000 internal links in Search console is not a bad thing? In the Links report I am seeing a lot of URLs that should not be there. Is there any way to remove these? (a few as examples). https://molinoglass.com/.../artist.../dichro-turtle-bong/...https://molinoglass.com/art-glass/page/1/?wmc-currency=USDhttps://molinoglass.com/cart/...MOLINOGLASS.COMTurtle Bong - Artists Series 9mm Thick Glass Bong with Dichro TurtleTurtle Bong - Artists Series 9mm Thick Glass Bong with Dichro Turtle
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  Kuba Serafinowski: You should either use JS instead of (see my other comment) or add nofollow to internal links such as add to cart, login etc.This actually wastes crawling budget, but you won`t see a huge uplift when you fix this as this isn`t a big site.
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  Richard Hearne: There is certainly some miscommunication here - either your SEO isn`t communicating what his concerns are correctly, your not understanding what his concerns are, a bit of both, or someone in this chain of communication is incompetent. Are you asking about URLs or Links please?
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  John Smith: Internal links uncrawlable, or Im missing something or you need a new guy..
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  Sean Clarke: He says that we need to reduce the number of internal links as shown in Search Console. Currently it`s almost 47K links. He says this is hurting us.
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  Richard Hearne: Sean Clarke if someone is telling you this, the likelihood is they don`t know what they are doing. Having too many URLs might be an issue, especially if you have only 300 products, but there`s no way having 47K internal links could possibly hurt. So I call bullshit on your "SEO".
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  Regie Macalam: I’ve been doing SEO for years and this is something not in my list of to-care-for, unless we’re talking about 47k internal links where many of those leads to server errors or error pages or that your site is on a sluggish server.For as long as your linking internally to enhance your users’ experience, you should be fine. Google wants you to satisfy your users the same way they want to satisfy their users by serving your site in SERP.About making links uncrawlable, that should only be done to pages that don’t need to get indexed - think of private pages, dashboards and such where bots are off limits. Same thing can be done to pages you deem has no value to users (Google refer to these pages as thin or low quality). But then again, Google’s bots are smart enough to pick up pages that matter. On your end, just keep your website free from errors, the likes of redirect chains, error 500, soft 404s, etc. Focus on Crawl Errors report in Search Console instead as well as Data Structure to influence serving of featured snippets especially that yours is an e-commerce website.
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  Jenni Brown: Is your new SEO consultant involved in some corporate espionage with a competitor
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  Sean Clarke: Jenni Brown LOL. No, there is zero chance of that.
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  David Rosam: I think your new consultant is getting some issues muddled. Unless you have a very large site, crawl budget is not going to be an issue. You don`t have a very large site. If your internal links help your users, then you should leave them exactly as they are.
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  Sean Clarke: David Rosam Thanks David, that is very useful.
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  Michael Martinez: "We have been told by our new SEO consultant that to save on crawl budget we should make a lot of our internal links uncrawlable."Unless you have over 100, 000 pages you don`t need to worry about crawl budget.And making internal links uncrawlable is the last thing you should do.
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  Jeff Ferguson: Crawl budget can be a real concern, for truly big sites. For instance, I’ve done work on The Smithsonian and Manchester United - hundreds of thousands of pages. Three hundred shouldn’t be a problem. That said, if the links are linking to SEO worthless pages, such as your privacy policy, you could no follow them to conserve sharing authority for other more important pages.
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  Kevin Carney: Jeff Ferguson Good answer!
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  J Gwendolyn Arana: If the accessory links are beneficial to customers, then I wouldn`t stress on them.
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  John Carcutt: Wikipedia tends to be top of first page for almost everything. (Or did till a recent update)They probably have more internal links per/page than over 90% of the sites out there.