Internal Linking - How many is too many?

Hi all,

Super quick short intro: I've been managing some insurance/financial websites in different EU countries. Hard market, quite competitive niche. OnPage/LinkBulding/PR/Social Media, we do all of these in order to help our SEO efforts and visibility.

Question regarding OnPage signs. We have linked in the footer all our main pages, with optimized anchor text. In the end we have thousands of internal links to these pages. Do you have an idea on what is the best ratio to use for Internal Links? Do you think this is too many and can it impact rankings?

I'm an advocate of silo approach so that number of internlinking pages without topical theme makes me uneasy and this amount of links on every page fucks with keyword density.

I think the better question is whether all these links are actually needed in the footer?

In my experience users couldn't give a shit about the footer apart from if they are looking for about us etc.

Then when you factor in the negatives of all these links on every single page it seems like a no brainier to me

Hope this helps

they will not harm you ..... so no problem to use them if you think its good ....

If you want to see the upper bounds of interlinking, look at any Wikipedia page

Footer links are not recommended unless they are relevant and need accessed from every page. Secondly, avoid using overoptimized anchors when linking sitewide, it would be a problem it itself. The best way is to check how your competitiors are managing to keep their rankings.