Is it time to retire "similar links" from the SEO arsenal ?

[JS_Harris]

At the bottom of many sites can be found a "similar links" section that helps direct visitors to other related content. In the past such similar links had an impact on overall site ranking because each link was a vote to an internal page. The direct effect of passing pagerank to that page aside the practice of using similar links in general had an overall effect of INCREASING article value overall while DECREASING category value (articles passed more 'link juice' between each other, thus less to the category).

Today, when you do a link search of your site in real serps you do not see these links showing up as internal links anymore. You DO see internal links showing up when you linked to an internal page in the middle of an article but the dedicated section for "internal links" doesn't seem to work as it used to on many sites I've very familiar with.

I feel this warrants discussion because interlinking related articles together is critical in a well rounded site structure plan and many sites have relied solely on their "similar links" sections to handle this.

If a webmaster relied on this site feature...
- Is it time to go back and manually add a lot of internal links to existing pages inside content?
- Is it time to remove the feature given that it DOES help human traffic?
- Is it time to insert scripts that automatically interlink pages by linking pre-determined keywords to target pages?

[edited by: JS_Harris at 10:08 pm (utc) on Jan. 9, 2009]

[phranque]

usually the number one rule is to do what's best for the visitor.
if the "similar links" feature is "useless but worthless", perhaps you should nofollow those links.
i'm not sure i would go with the auto linking script.
i might consider using it with a handcheck and editing for relevance.

[JS_Harris]

Adding nofollow to the links wouldn't have any effect, they don't show up as internal links in real serps (they do in WMT, but not in real link queries which are what matter).

It benefits the visitors for me to boost the important pages rankings else they won't find those pages to begin with.