How quickly should I add internal links?

[NeverStop]

I'm working on a site with 10,000+ articles, 5,000+ of which have no inbound links. How fast should I be adding internal links? Does it matter at all? Currently doing about 20 per day but could go quite a bit faster. I want to avoid setting off any "red flags" though. This site was hit by the recent updates.

Thoughts? Has anyone tested this?

 

[Ryuzaki]

I wouldn't worry about "internal link velocity" at all. I'd want to get the work done as fast as possible so Google crawls it as soon as possible so the new data (relevance and page rank flows) can be used in the incoming updates sooner than later.

I don't think there's any red flags. Even with anchor text, I'd go pretty hard with the keywords you want to rank for, their variations, etc. Google interferes with a lot of what we do on and off of our sites, but the one thing they don't really demand out of us is to mold our internal linking to their liking, other than not having a million links on each page because it sucks for their crawlers.

 

[jnnkov]

As @Ryuzaki mentioned previously, you can usually add internal links as fast as possible and optimize the anchor text as hard as possible.

If you want to speed up the process, you can use a WP Plugin (like Link Whisper) or a tool like InLinks (works as a script on any website). Especially when you have multiple thousands of pages, this will save you incredible amounts of time and works quite well for English texts.

 

[socialpatterns]

I agree with @Ryuzaki first part, but not the second part. You can add internal links as fast or as frequent or infrequent as you desire. There is no internal link velocity like you have with backlinks.

Even with anchor text, I'd go pretty hard with the keywords you want to rank for, their variations, etc.

I respectfully disagree with this (I know every SEO has varying opinions on things)

Internal Links & Anchor Text

I have a story about this. In 2018 a friend of mine (who also happened to be the person who started teaching me SEO 15 years ago), had a relatively high-traffic site and he had lost a ton of traffic overnight after an update. I helped him troubleshoot the issue. I looked over his site and had a hunch it was an over-optimization hit. I explained my theory, and he changed up a lot of internal links, on-page content, etc. I even recommended that he nofollow all his site-wide sidebar links which were very exact match keyword heavy. (I reasoned, hey if youtube nofollows their recommended videos on the side, why not).

Part of my hunch was that 1) when searching for the keyword that it used to rank #1, the site was buried and 2) when searching Site:example.com/example-page, it would also be buried, so I knew it was being punished for something.

Guess what happened after all the changes? We recrawled the site in GSC and instantly it brought back rankings (...well, some instant rankings, some took a day or two, then the rest gradually but fairly quickly). They just started coming back to his previous levels.

So I know google actively at one point tried to "level the playing field" between SEOs and non-SEOs. However, they have since scaled that back quite a bit. I do believe some shades of over-optimization, even internal links are still a small factor and possibly could come back in the future.

In fact, from the horse's mouth:

Avoid:​

• Using excessively keyword-filled or lengthy anchor text just for search engines.
• Creating unnecessary links that don't help with the user's navigation of the site.

(Source)

I Agree with this advice.

Internal Links & Number of Links

You won't be directly punished or anything for adding lots of links. But if you are doing this just for the sake of adding lots of links you could be shooting yourself in the foot.

Really, you should have a strategy to have a higher statistical distribution of links congregating around your pillar and subpillar pages. You still want to silo your pages in some sort of way to give structure and relevance to your most important pages. Linking with no strategy is a partially futile effort.

Internal Links & Velocity

Don't worry about velocity. Do it all in a day if you want.