How to maximize internal links for SEO
These are the links worth investing into and the best way to structure them.
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Many in the SEO industry are obsessed with links but may focus on the wrong ones. Rather than backlinks, the most important links are internal links, which are much easier to get and control.
To understand this, look at the words of Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s original research:
Academic citation literature has been applied to the web, largely by counting citations or backlinks to a given page. This gives some approximation of a page’s importance or quality. PageRank extends this idea by not counting links from all pages equally, and by normalizing by the number of links on a page. PageRank is defined as follows: We assume page A has pages T1...Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations). The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85.
This just means that each page begins with a score of 1, but the final score is a function of all its outbound links added to the score of all its inbound links.
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The value of the homepage
In this calculation, a website's homepage tends to be the most linked page, which can distribute the site’s authority throughout the rest of the website through its links. Pages close to the homepage or linked more frequently from pages linked from the homepage will score higher. Achieving this right mix via internal linking is critical.
Inbound Link Authority
The homepage will never be the only page that receives authoritative external links. If an internal page receives a powerful external link but doesn’t link to other pages, the external link is essentially wasted. When pages link to each other, the authority of all external links is funneled around a site to the overall benefit of all pages.
Proper internal link structure is straightforward for sites with flat architecture or only a few pages. Improving internal link structure on large sites can be as powerful as acquiring authoritative external links regarding their impact on SEO. (In this case, a large site might have as few as one hundred pages.)
Large Site Challenges
An orphaned page is defined as a page that doesn’t have any pointing to it. Due to the structure of many large sites, there will invariably be orphaned pages. Even a media site like a blog or daily news site, which has a very clean architecture, will also have an internal linking challenge.
The daily news site or blog already has each post/article living under a specific day, which helps with daily organic traffic. However, more than likely, the site will desire organic traffic that isn’t just someone searching out that day’s or recent news. There will be posts that they might hope would be highly visible many years into the future. Think of the review of a product on its launch day. That review will be relevant if the product is on the shelf. Granted, these posts were published on a particular day, but they are appropriate for many queries forever.
Ideal Link Architecture
As you might imagine, creating an ideal link architecture for all sites with this challenge that flows links around the site can significantly impact overall traffic as these orphaned or weakly linked pages join the internal site link web and now get authority.
How to Improve the Link Graph
Related page algorithms on each page are simple modules that search across all pages with similar content and display associated links. Implement these to crosslink to other pages and boost internal links and authority to far-flung parts of your sites. However, the tool is only helpful if the algorithm isn’t tightly tuned to a specific relationship. When these algorithms are developed, they sometimes key off specific connections between pages.
Visualizing Internal Link Graphs
To visualize the desired structure of internal linking, I think of a site’s link graph as an airline route map.
National flag airlines
The least effective internal link graph looks like the route map of a small country's national carrier. These air carriers have a single hub in their capital city, and spokes point worldwide from that hub. Think of the route map for Singapore Airlines or Emirates, each with impressive reach for a flag carrier. However, with only a few exceptions, all their flights terminate in Singapore/Dubai.
Applying this mental visual to websites, think of the hub as the homepage. The homepage links to all the other pages, but very few internal pages link to others. For the search crawler to discover a new page, they would have first to visit the homepage.
United Airlines
The most common type of link graph looks like the route map of a large global carrier. Think of United Airlines as an example. There are obvious hubs (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Newark, Houston, Denver…), and these hubs connect to each other and other smaller satellite cities.
Again, applying this visual to websites, the homepage would be the biggest city on the route map, for example, Newark, which links to all the other big cities and hubs. The other hubs would be important category pages, with many inbound links and links out to all the other smaller pages. In this link graph, important but more minor pages would only have one pathway to get to them.
Search crawlers will only discover new pages if they are linked to one of those hub pages, and the crawler will not find that new page until it revisits the hub pages.
Southwest Airlines
However, the ideal internal link graph looks like the route map of a budget airline that thrives on point-to-point connections. This route map makes no sense to the bi-coastal business traveler, but the wandering tourist can get anywhere they need to go as long as they can handle many stopovers. Southwest Airlines is an excellent example of this structure.
Southwest has such a complicated route map that they don’t even show it on their website. You would have to choose a particular city and then see all the places you can get to directly. Some more popular cities are within their route map, but their direct flights almost seem random. A traveler can fly directly from Cleveland to major travel gateways like Atlanta, Chicago, and Dallas, but they can also go to Nashville, St Louis, Tampa, and Milwaukee.
This is how a website should be structured. Pages should link to essential pages and other pages that seem random. Those pages should link back to important pages and link to other random pages. Wherever a crawler enters, they will eventually find that new page, as there are many pathways to get there.
Think of a search engine crawler passing from one page to another, calculating authority as a traveler intent on flying to every city on an airline’s route map without ever needing to go to a single city more than once.
On Southwest Airlines, a traveler could begin their journey in Boise, Idaho, on any of the ten non-stop flights and make it to nearly every city without ever needing to repeat a city.
The Southwest Airlines structure is an ideal way to flow link value from externally acquired links. Since every page is connected in a web, each external link will benefit multiple pages no matter which page it is directed at. Build your internal link architecture like the Southwest Airlines route map, and you will never have an orphaned or sub-optimally linked page again.
Be random
My favorite hack to achieve this is just introducing randomization in the link architecture. Where logic fails, randomization always wins.
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i'm pretty good at random, so this is encouraging.
Be random will be my next motto