Internal Linking Process

[The Kloser]

I have been using WP plugin(s) as a way to automate internal linking, but more and more I'm finding out a lot of discrepancies and often times linking to the wrong posts. How do you implement your internal linking?

 

[Calamari]

Manually. The anchor text of your internal links is too important to let a plug in handle it.

 

[Potatoe]

When I post an article, I just manually add contextual links to relevant articles. I don't trust a robot to know what links are going to be useful for my visitors to navigate to.

At the end of a post, I'll also manually add a few resources to other pages on my site that are going to be interesting to somebody who just finished that page.

 

[stackcash]

@Ryuzaki can speak tomes on this topic. But yeah....don't use a plugin. Be very aware of where you want each page to link to, which anchors you're using, and what other sites you're linking out to on each page.

 

[The Kloser]

Virtual likes sent to all.

 

[cary]

Definitely of importance - direct all equity to a few big pools of focus on site.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Definitely do it manually. Just run a search on your site for old posts and give it a few internal links from there.

But as far as focusing all of your juice to one or two places very specifically, you could get penalized for it if your'e doing it on a ridiculous level.

You figure PR juice has a dampening factor of about 25%, meaning you lose 25% per link leap, and that's if and only if you have one link on the page. Let's not forget about navigation, footer, sidebar links, etc. We also know that juice flows differently through each, where a contextual link is like a bigger hole in a damn and a footer link to your About page is a tinier hole, but a hole nonetheless. The point is, all that juice you think you're controlling is really just a drippy drop, because the rest already leaked everywhere else anyways.

My perspective knowing all of this is that you're going to be hard pressed to control the flow of juice very well. With that in mind, your goal should be to interlink your site into a giant mini-internet web and let it flow all over the place. Let the long-tails flow in.

That's talking about juice. Your only worry with juice should be to make sure it spills all over the place so all of your boats rise with the tide.

What you should be worried about with internal linking is micro-relevancy and anchors. Guess what you can get away with internally? Exact match anchors, and a ton, especially when it's not automated and you still mix in other anchors (not in the way you'd do it externally though).

You can still create silo's without being extremely strict about your links and your juice. You do it with taxonomy like categories, tags, internal links, anchors, breadcrumbs. It has much less to do with links now.

But these anchors and micro-relevancy... This is why I talk about writing supporting pages on your site and creating a mini-silo. I might write an article for a "decision" or "action" term about widgets, meaning they are ready to convert. It might fetch 15,000 searches.

Then I immediately turn around in my blog and write three stupid posts like "The 7 Ways Widgets Saved the Economy" and "Debunking the Myths about Widgets" and "You'll Never Believe This Widget Making Accident & Discovery!". And then I link those back to the main money maker, two will use the exact match and one will use a variation just for security.

Suddenly, since I've not only spread juice all around my site like mad AND created a micro-relevancy silo, my site pops in on page 3. Then I promote the main page and do slight promotion of the 3 silly posts on platforms they were designed for, and now I'm on the bottom of page 2. I don't even trip, because after the next campaign or two for the next set of micro-silo's, the juice will keep spreading and everything keeps aging and that money posts slowly climbs page one. I'll try to shoot it a link here and there if I see an opportunity to help it climb on up.

I think you need to be more precious about internal linking. Definitely don't automate it. But spread the love as much as you can, and then go nuts on the link acquisition, and you're entire site will eat it up instead of just one or two posts.

 

[The Kloser]

​

Already then, time to go back and clean-up the mess I made. I will also be using a simple spreadsheet to track my internal linking efforts for main and support articles.

 

[EsR]

What's the best way to keep the entire internal linking map organized? Are you using excel/spreadsheets or is there another resource you've found useful to keep everything organized?

 

[The Kloser]

You should have a good idea about your internal interlinking based on how you mapped out/soiled your site. @Ryuzaki covered this here Question about silo structures

From there, you could just use a basic spreadsheet to pre/post document your internal links. As far as tools, I'm only using GWT internal linking report to track for now.