Internal Linking - What works best for you?

[ChokenBako]

Hello everyone,

in the past i was quite succesfull with internal linking. I had in my sidebar a section with random related articles. Around 40 Articles. The nternal linking boosted a lot of power to many of my websites. After the June Update and now the May Update this method does not work anymore. It seems that Google doesn´t care about the internal link juice anymore.

So my question is: Do you know any good technique for internal linking, that works better than my method above?

I´m excited to hear your opinions!

[goodroi]

Embed the links within relevant content creating a spiderweb inside your site. Navigation links (header/footer/sidebar) tend to not be as valuable as links embedding in content.

Don't rely solely on internal links to rank your pages. Make sure you use a comprehensive SEO approach. What Google is favoring today might not be what they favor tomorrow. A comprehensive approach does take more resources & effort but will make a website more resilient in the rankings.

[lucy24]

Think of the humans. If I have a longish discussion of some subject, and then a year later I have occasion to mention the same subject in a different context on some other page*, that gets a link to the page with the longer discussion. After all, if your own content isn’t worth linking to, what’s it even there for?


* Occasionally preceded by looking it up from scratch and then realizing “Oh, wait, I’ve talked about this before.”

[EditorialGuy]

I had in my sidebar a section with random related articles.

And therein lies your problem. Such links serve no purpose (other than being an obvious attempt to transfer "link juice,") so it's no wonder that Google doesn't give them as much weight as it might have done in the past.

If you're going to use navigation links, why not feature links that your readers will want to click on?. Even if you didn't gain any "link juice" benefits, those useful navigation links would be likely to improve user retention and traffic.

[jdcreators]

Follow links are the best way to build out the internal link architecture of your content marketing. One theoretical internal linking strategy of the past was to nofollow most of the links on a page, in order to increase the link juice to a single page.

[Robert Charlton]

One theoretical internal linking strategy of the past was to nofollow most of the links on a page, in order to increase the link juice to a single page.

This wasn't just theoretical... It was called PageRank sculpting, and Google was aware of it. Eventually Google decided to change the way it computed PageRank, to discourage the approach.

See this discussion here...
Google Changes Treatment of PR 'Saved' by rel=nofollow Sculpting
June 2009
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3925952.htm [webmasterworld.com]

In general, it's a total waste of PageRank to nofollow an internal link, and there are very few occasions where I could justify using nofollow within an internal nav structure.

Building a site hierarchically is a much more strategic way to distribute "link juice" I would not build the hierarchy into the file urls, though, but I would build a hierarichal structure of pages from which I would link.

I completely agree with the point EditorialGuy makes. Build your nav structure around topics that you want to lead users to, using intelligent categorization. Use related articles with prioritized intent, not for random distribution of link juice.

[tangor]

I use the KISS method of linking: Only if it makes sense and provides more information to the visitor.