As Google continuously updates its search engine algorithms to promote fresh, relevant content and remove useless information, web owners are also constantly on the lookout whether or not their search rankings have been affected. To ensure that you will not be penalized with Google’s latest Panda update, here are “Panda-proof” internal linking strategies that you should implement on your websites.

Develop an organised main navigation menu

While keeping a clean and simple navigation menu is always thumbs up in terms of user experience, it does not promote a site-wide internal linking. You can develop an organised main navigation menu by including sub sections and categories appropriately. This way, you can take advantage of side-wide internal linking in a safe manner. However, to avoid being stuck by Panda, make sure that your navigation is extremely well organised and is not using manipulative anchor texts or stuffed keywords.

Create secondary navigation

Of course, you couldn’t put everything on your main navigation menu. Because of this, you have to develop a secondary navigation system where you can showcase links to web pages that are not normally part of the main sections but could be useful to your visitors, such as Popular Brands or Most Discussed Articles. You may want to put a secondary navigation on either side of the homepage or a site-wide footer.

Use breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are an ideal way to increase internal linking, while providing ease of navigation to visitors of the site. Typically, breadcrumbs are structured the same way that the information architecture of the website is designed. However, you can utilize these links not only for users’ navigation, but to draw traffic, attain rich snippets, and hopefully achieve higher click through rate in the SERPs.

Be sure to have a Related Content section

If your website features products, videos, or blogs that are presented on separate pages, make sure that each item features a “Related Content” section at the bottom of the page where it links to other pages of similar nature. This allows visitors to view other similar content and search engine crawlers to index more pages of your website.

Most importantly, when planning the internal linking structure and strategies of your website, be sure that each link makes sense and brings value outside the scope of SEO. Think primarily of your users before considering any search engine algorithm update. If a link brings value to your human visitors, then you wouldn’t have to worry about Panda – or any other algorithm update for that matter.