What I've learned testing internal linking strategies

Jun 28, 2022 10:56 am

Hey, last week I sent you an email on how to find internal links on wordpress sites with any site's search feature.


It was a little trick that I discovered a while ago.


Over the last few months, I've been testing out internal linking extensively which is how I picked that up.


People seemed to like that email, maybe you did too, so, what the hell... Another week about internal linking it is!


Internal links, or interlinking as I like to call it, is one of the most complicated things to get right as an SEO. There are strategies that we can call 'tried and tested', but it doesn't necessarily mean they're producing the best results.


We can break down internal linking into multiple sub-considerations:


  • Placement (where you put them on the page)
  • Anchor text
  • Number on a page
  • Number to a page
  • The selection strategy


That's why it's complicated.


You could have the perfect anchor text strategy, for example. What happens if all the other things are wrong? That's what I needed to find out.


So a few months of testing down the line and I've learned some interesting things that I'm going to share with you. Along with the selection strategy that is working best for me.


220 Tests: What I've Learned About Interlinking


So the first thing to say is that placement seems to be more important than anchor text. This was weird to me, it goes against everything I thought I knew.


There were many many tests where nothing happened at all. Meaning the internal links had no effect whatsoever. In those cases, it was always when the placement was wrong. It invalidated the strategy on hundreds of sites I've observed doing well in previous years that have since been affected by updates. What bugs me about this is that one placement strategy that failed time and again provides a pleasant user experience. Data is data 🤷‍♂️


Anchor text continues to matter, but whether I was using exact match, something incredibly long-tail, or seemingly unrelated I could correlate the success rate to the link placement, not the anchor text. It's a small dataset but I could find no consistent results with anchor text when using the link placement that my tests were showing to be the incorrect approach.


So in and of itself anchor text alone didn't seem to indicate the successful improvement of a page by gaining an internal link.


Anchor text matters most when considering the overall anchor text cloud a page receives, which is to say that you can't use the same anchor text on all your links. That continues to be important.


Number on a page seems to matter little compared to the number to a page. Having pages with 10+ internal links that come from somewhere other than the general site structure seems to bring worse results.


The pattern I've identified is that diminishing returns start at 3 internal links and negative results often begin at 8 internal links. So this has given birth to the rule of 3/5/8. I'll aim for 3, expecting best results to really be at around 5, while making sure to never go above 8. This is something that can be built into a number of systems, so it's an excellent rule to have.


I spent an exhaustive amount of time testing selection strategies and settled on four methods that work best.


What they all share in common is that they start with outbound internal links. This means building my internals based on good places to link from instead of good places to link to.


Method 1: Pages with >50 clicks per month.

Method 2: Pages with >1 backlink.


These provide the best results time and again. I then combined these with two additional methods that tested well.


Method 3: Position opportunities (4-11)

Method 4: Search volume opportunities (over 500/mo on the main keyword)


This means prioritising relevant internal links to pages that fit methods 3 & 4 from pages that are selected using methods 1 & 2.


That simple selection strategy combined with good link placement and looking at anchor text more as something to not over-optimize has provided the best results from all of my testing.


The biggest takeaway from this for you should be that internal links are one of the main things you should be testing.


There are few things that can provide such a high impact in terms of both positive and negative results.


It's not about testing ranking factors either, it's about testing processes. Once you have processes that you have confidence in you can build systems that allow you to scale effectively.


Give a couple of the above methods a test, but better yet, start testing your own internal linking process to see where you can improve it.


Next week, I'm releasing a huge batch of new videos for my paid group. So I'll preview that for anyone interested. After that I'll have a think about sharing some of the other things I've been testing this year if this proves to be a popular share.


As always, thanks for reading.

- Daniel

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