Internal linking can be the most impactful way SEOs can make a difference to a site, but it can also give you a massive amount of frustration if it’s not handled properly.
I explore what internal links are, the issues you can encounter with them, how to find internal linking opportunities and how to prove the worth of improving internal linking to clients and other stakeholders
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They establish a hierarchy
of the information on the
website
(including the ability to group/silo
content and indicate page
importance)
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“Google must constantly search for new
pages and add them to its list of known
pages. Some pages are known because
Google has already crawled them before.
Other pages are discovered when Google
follows a link from a known page to a new
page.”
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Broken Internal Links
Links to Redirected Pages
Links to broken pages
Redirect chains
Orphan Pages
Links to Unimportant Pages
Link Depth
Overuse/Spammy use of Internal Links
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Content duplication (through inconsistent interlinking -
eg / vs non-/)
Poor use of anchor text
Onclick= links causing indexation
Broken markup
Nofollow internal links
… and more!
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Use a crawler to find mentions of
your target keywords and the
related keywords with Custom
Search
Then work through those lists,
adding links
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Find the most powerful
pages on your site (you
can do this using Ahrefs,
SEMRush and similar)
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Add relevant links (as and
where possible) from those
powerful pages, to your
target pages (using relevant
anchor text, of course!)
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Sometimes this can be difficult as
you might not find any relevant
pages to link from, however,
when you are able to, there is
good opportunity for the page
you’re going to be linking to.
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Plus, this way is great if the
manual and semi-automated
ways have found nothing
relevant for you to link from.
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You can find it in Site Audit >
Tools > Link Opportunities and
it combines ranking data with
content scraping to offer
opportunities to add valuable
internal links
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You can see why this can
become an issue,
especially when you’re
linking from power pages or
building links to the origin
page
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Being able to quantify
these changes isn’t a
spot on science, but
here’s one way you could
change this!
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If you are able to find an example
of a page where you added an
internal link - grab the data before
the link was added, and again
when a link was added from
another page
(or when it was removed)
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Remember to be more
conservative with the data if
you can, especially if you have
a client that holds you to
account for not matching your
expected figures
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Internal Linking Tips
● Monitor internal link changes by using site crawls
● Make changes as soon as you can
● Do not put all of your navigation links in the footer!
● Ensure your anchor text isn’t spammy
● Use business cases to get client/stakeholder buy in
● Work alongside other teams if needed
● Don’t overdo it with on page links
● Use markup to enrich specific internal links (eg breadcrumb)
● Keyword research and Google Analytics are invaluable resources which
are often neglected with internal linking
● When you acquire new links, make sure that the link sources have internal
links to relevant pages
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I’m an SEO Consultant - both in house and freelance! Some might say I have the best of both worlds.
I’m based here in Brighton, in the UK
Explaining that since I last spoke we’ve had 2 lockdowns, acquired more hobbies and interests. One of mine being Below Deck.
The way I see internal linking is akin to the London tube map.Navigating around the site (whether as a user or a bot) is like going to the destination you need to get to. If there’s something in the way, your journey will see some kind of change - you either find another way, or you give up! We don’t want users or bots to give up - hence why internal linking issues need to be dealt with
I don’t really recommend using Wordpress plugins for adding internal links as it can get quite spammy and slow down a site (and they are obviously only applicable to sites built on Wordpress)
But what you could do is combine the first two methods with the use of specific internal link plugins such as the below, to find and add internal linking opportunities:
Linkwhisper
SEO Auto Linker
I’m far from keen on this method, but it might help some of you if you are REALLY stuck or short of time and the site is a Wordpress one. There are lots of risks though, especially if you remove the plugin as there’s then the risk of the links being removed and you having to fix all of that mess!
Of course, the above will depend on a few factors (eg a page in the link sequence might have acquired an external link, have had a content refresh etc in that time) so it’s important to 1. Keep that in consideration and 2. Use a page that’s less likely for that to happen to. Also keep in mind seasonality, days of the week, demand changes etc so that your data is as accurate as possible
If you’re not able to do this, then things are a little more tricky and it’s more ‘finger in the air’ modelling scenarios where you model the data for an increase or decrease in ranking and what that means for traffic, conversions and the monetary value