Is internal linking useless for SEO?

[scottb]

I pointed the most important page and another important page on my site to a third page with prominent links. The third page didn't move up in the rankings at all. It makes me wonder if internal linking has no value for SEO.

Agree or disagree?

[not2easy]

SEO is not a science with clear cut cause and effect. It is a art that is nuanced by many large and small factors, most of them unseen. It is impossible to deduce that there is (or is not) any SEO effect on any single isolated action that a person might take or not take. Add to that the factor of time and the additional factor of repeatability and you will see that you are not so easily able to determine the cause of any effect whether it is a positive or negative effect.

So I must say I disagree with your conclusion (and your method). Although my conclusion may be flawed because the situation as described might have omitted some key factors.

[scottb]

I respect the reasonableness of your reply. I agree that my internal links alone may not be enough to change the rank of the third page.

But I don't agree with your point about my method. My method was the addition of internal links on two major site pages. How else to test the SEO value of internal links other than to add internal links to the most important pages on a site?

Otherwise, what is your opinion about the SEO value of internal links?

[NickMNS]

How else to test the SEO value of internal links other than to add internal links to the most important pages on a site?

There is no way to reliably test this as there are far too many factor that you do not control that can influence the outcome. To test this would require running the experiment across many sites, many times. What impact did changing your previous link structure have? You don't know if the change (if any) was the result of changing the status quo, or the new link pattern. Maybe one cancels out the other. Maybe you need to wait longer. Bottom line is you are in the realm of the unknowable.

As such you're best to focus on what makes most sense for your users instead for Googlebot. Internal links are crucial for site navigation, if users can't easily get to critical pages then they wont see them they wont link to them and any marginal benefit from "link sculpting" will be lost.

[iamlost]

Right up front, as always, must be the disclaimer that only the SE, eg Google, knows (for some degree of ‘know’ within the automagically algo black box) what values are passed by what links and what the calculation result at any given point, eg page, might be. All else is correlation, supposition, and hypothesis.

One testable hypothesis, albeit subjective not objective for reason given above, is to run a before and after basic, ie based solely on original PR paper, PageRank analysis.

See my lonely topic The Power of Flow, Courtesy of the Theory of PageRank [webmasterworld.com], from October 2017.

[Wilburforce]

My method was the addition of internal links on two major site pages. How else to test the SEO value of internal links other than to add internal links to the most important pages on a site?

If you are trying to manipulate Google results - clearly you are - and Google notices, the most likely outcome is negative, and very possibly terminal.

If it was possible to test any hypothesis about any on-site or on-page practice simply by making a change and instantly seeing the result in Google results, everything about How Google Works would have been known long ago. The fact is, however, that How Google Works has never been simply determinable by outsiders, and since the introduction of machine-learning - not to mention the thousands of nuances that almost every letter of text and character of code brings to the table - what was never clear to begin with has become increasingly opaque.

Good internal linking - making it easy for users to find what they seek - will, overall, have a beneficial effect. Trying to push a page up the rankings by saying on a different page, without reference to its relevance for the user - HERE, LOOK AT THIS - will, if it has any effect at all, do the opposite.

Work on best practice, not on trying to fathom the unfathomable with simple A/B comparisons. I can promise you that Google's algorithm is smarter than you.

[aristotle]

You should only interlink pages that have closely-related content.

Also, I would bet that google's algorithm gives a lot more credit to links that users tend to click than it does to links that rarely get clicked.

[scottb]

Iamlost, very good point.

"If you are trying to manipulate Google results - clearly you are - and Google notices, the most likely outcome is negative, and very possibly terminal."

SEO is the practice of manipulating Google results. If not, why do people put such an enormous effort into it?

"You should only interlink pages that have closely-related content."

Yes, I agree. They are closely related.

All that said, I think you all are giving excellent and thoughtful responses, but I'm still not sure I'm hearing anyone saying that internal linking has SEO value. If the answer is, none of us know or can prove it, then I'm happy with that answer too.

[Wilburforce]

SEO is the practice of manipulating Google results.

Optimize or optimise: make the best or most effective use of (a situation or resource). (Oxford English Dictionary).

The interpretation that it means "trick Google into ranking your page bettter" is ten years out of date, and will do you no good.

I think a principal problem with your question is that it is binary. The fact is that links have some effect. The degree and direction of that effect are subject to the on-page context and target of each individual link, and may affect the linking page as well as the linked page.

A lot has been said elsewhere on how Google interprets a searcher's intention, but don't believe for one moment that Google ignores webmaster intention. If the context and target of your links allow Google to infer an intention to manipulate results*, you can forget about improving the position of anything. The fact that the links are internal will make that intention more visible.


_{*edit - for the purposes of this discussion, you can take this to include trying to test an aspect of the algorithm.}

[Robert Charlton]

To agree with what several posters have mentioned here, it's impossible to tell simply from the methodology you describe whether your experiment was valid.

I'm going to throw another set of variables into the mix, and that is that Google doesn't like to see attempts at manipulation... and, depending on the history of what you've done with your site, Google has patented an algo routine which might be testing what you do on your site to see whether your "tests" are manipulative in intent.

It was discussed here some years ago in the thread I link to below, and I've brought it up several times since. I'm fairly certain I've seen the rank modification pattern the patent describes, and other members here have agreed.

Basically, whatever you do when you test something like linking, and you don't get the expected results, don't fiddle with it and try something else. After you tried the extra links and they didn't work, what did you do with them? Change them back? Try adding more links? Whatever.

I can't say what the proper "waiting period" should be, if that's even a good way to describe it... but I'm sure that Google has analyzed the patterns and can detect manipulative intent fairly well. It's a complex read, but it's worth your attention...

Google's Rank Modifying Patent for Spam Detection
Aug 18, 2012
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4486158.htm [webmasterworld.com]

[Robert Charlton]

PS: I myself think that good internal linking is a key element of onsite optimization, but there's a whole design strategy that's involved... The quality of your content and your promotion of it are very much a factor.

It also takes some time for the results to evolve. How one anticipates inbound linking patterns to a site and makes best use of those inbound links is very much a part of it. The strategies can vary a lot for different types of sites. What works for Wikipedia or a news site doesn't necessarily work, eg, for a large ecommerce or a directory type site.

[aristotle]

I remember being initially skeptical that google would include this "rank modifying" test of webmaster intent in its algorithm, because I thought it could be unreliable.

But as a simple-minded example of how I now think it could work, consider the case of a webmaster who makes a change that he or she hopes will improve a site's rankings, but instead the rankings almost immediately take a significant drop. Then the webmaster quickly reverses the change, in hopes of getting back to the former higher rankings. Instead they drop even lower.

But if the webmaster doesn't quickly reverse the change, but simply gives it more time to work, then the rankings might gradually regain the lost ground and possibly go even higher.

[rhcerff]

Internal linking can be crucial for SEO.

This not only helps Google (or any other crawler) to crawl from page to page but gives internal context. An internal link may not be the boost you're needing, but should be used to promote your website's very own net.