Should I auto link internal pages on an established site?

Is using an auto linking feature to connect pages a good idea?

[JS_Harris]

I have a site that is established (2 years) and has roughly 300 pages.

I have several "most important" pages that I'd like people to find easily but there are too many to simply add them to the sidebar. There are also a handful of sites I refer to quite often which I'd also auto link but they are nofollow links so I'm not concerned about those external links.

I'm leaning towards using an auto linking script to automatically link the keywords I choose with those pages. Every time that term gets written, the page would be linked. 3 "auto-links" maximum per page with no pages "self linking" to themselves is how I'd set it up.

With 300 pages I'd expect some pages to get a few dozen links pointing to them instantly. Should I expect my site to tank in serps as a result? I like the idea of being able to change the page all links point to without needing to manually visit every page. I can't imagine doing that when the site gets too big.

Does anyone have any experience with using a linking feature that might offer advice on preserving site status with search engines ?

[Marcia]

Do a site search here on "excessive internal linking", read the discussions, and then decide for yourself.

[JS_Harris]

Thank Marcia, though I do want to avoid excessive internal linking I also see the huge benefit of being able to control all links without needing to re-visit a lot of pages or run database functions manually.

If I take one of the most successful encyclopedia type websites on the internet as an example I should be creating a page about every single aspect of my sites topic and then linking every single mention of that keyword to it's topic page.

Mixed messages abound and I'm not finding any site that appear penalized for internal linking, quite the opposite.

[JS_Harris]

My decision - I'm going to use the site as a test subject. Lack of definitive answers leaves me little choice.

I've prepared a set of 16 keywords to 16 of what I consider the most important pages on my site. I'll let 30 days pass in which I see very little change is natural search results and I won't make any changes to the site myself.

Then I'll turn the feature on and observe what happens over the next 60 days without making any changes at all. I'll review the pages when I turn on the auto-link feature to make sure none of them look funny. No linking of the middle of titles or bold text etc...

Should be interesting. Wish me luck.

[SarK0Y]

Hi, JS_Harris
solution has two ways:
1st - sort all links by subjects and give to user related links(add info to db manually).
2nd - parse each page by keywords via script and it will add info to db by auto mode. i.e. user gets related links with same keywords of the read links.

[edited by: SarK0Y at 5:07 pm (utc) on Dec. 9, 2008]

[maximillianos]

We've had a lot of success adding a "related articles" section to each page. It allows us to expose more pages while at the same time increasing the value of the page's relevance.

[SarK0Y]

maximillianos, do you add 'related articles' manually to each page or link to the new article adds automatically?

[maximillianos]

Sarkoy,

I built a custom-coded module to find related articles. My site has over 50,000 pages of content, so it is nearly impossible to do anything manual. I pretty much automate everything... at least as much as I can. =)

[SarK0Y]

well, well, maximillianos i should be wonder very much, if it was not automated:)))
>>> I pretty much automate everything... at least as much as I can
if no secret, more details here, Please.