Tips for internal linking at scale?

jlsc

jlsc

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Have you found a system for adding internal links to new posts from old posts?

I use the LinkWhisper pro plugin which works well sometimes and not as well sometimes. There are times when my old posts don't have perfect anchor text waiting to link to my new posts. In those cases, LinkWhisper isn't able to surface any opportunities to build links to the new post that make sense.

My other strategy is to make a hyperlinked list of related posts, then go into each post in the list, paste the list in, remove the link to the post I'm in, save the post and move onto the next one. This works, but I know that lists of links aren't ideal and the manual process is kinda a PIA.

Am I missing something? Is there an easier way to systematize making sure my new posts come out of the gate with as many relevant internal links pointing at them as possible?

For reference, I have about 450 posts.

Thanks!
 
I did this recently on a site with 300ish posts, I used LinkWhisper and just massaged it a bit - still so much easier than doing it manually (Which I've done in the past, too). If you aren't getting the best suggestions with LinkWhisper, I've found that it helps to manually add some additional keywords to the list and then it tends to spit out some better suggestions, or just add a line or two of text to the posts and use your anchors and you're set.

I use RankMath and I'm pretty diligent about adding keywords into RankMath's KW field as I post, so that helps LinkWhisper to find good opportunities, too.

Letting LinkWhisper do 75% of the work and greasing the wheels yourself for the other 25% is the best route I've found thus far, but I'm curious to see what other suggestions you get.
 
Thanks a lot for your response. You make some good points about diligently adding target KWs in Rank Math or Yoast. I haven't been the best at that historically.

Potatoe said:
add a line or two of text to the posts and use your anchors and you're set.
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When you're adding the line of text in order to create an anchor for your new post, are you doing that via the LinkWhisp interface? (Like, it makes a suggestion that isn't quite right, so you edit it to add a sentence.) Or are you actually going into the old post to add the sentence and link?

It's the manual clicking around keeping track of things that gets hard for me to manage, but I agree, LinkWhisper helps a lot.

Do you have a strategy keeping track of which links you need to add manually? Like if you add 5 links via LW, but you know you have more old posts that should link to the new post. I've been using Clariti to triangulate this sort of thing, but it's still pretty clunky.

Thanks again.
 
jlsc said:
When you're adding the line of text in order to create an anchor for your new post, are you doing that via the LinkWhisp interface? (Like, it makes a suggestion that isn't quite right, so you edit it to add a sentence.) Or are you actually going into the old post to add the sentence and link?
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I tried that, it's pretty janky. I'm not super scientific with it, this was more about "just get it done, get these posts interlinked" because I had a lot of orphans.

I don't really have a strategy for keeping track of things, I'm just going to be a lot more mindful of it from the get-go on my newer site.

Going into the old post and adding the link would probably be easier than trying to edit it using LinkWhisper. What I really like about LinkWhisper is that it shows you how many links each post has in/out, which was super helpful for what I needed to do. It's probably not as relevant to what you're doing, since for me it was like "Ok, I need to get all of this done ASAP, I'm not going to be too precious about it..."
 
At scale I use Site Auditor within Ahrefs. But really, it's also good to do things more manually where you are more focused on pushing juice around your site.

Often I will link from a heavily linked to URL (high UR), to a URL that I am trying to rank. Simple stuff but worth doing.
 
I have literally made a plugin for Worpress using ChatGPT that based on the slugs of the URLs I get in each article the matches in the text of the entry with those slugs and simply by clicking a button adds me a link.

It is still manual, since I have to enter each post and see the matches. Then just click on each match and the link is added.

I want to improve it to make it more automatic, but I am still developing it. It is very similar to the plugins discussed above, but in this case I rely on slugs (so if the site doesn't have simple slugs it doesn't work well).
 
The way I handle this is three-fold:
  1. As every post is formatted and prepped for publication, it must link out to at least 2 or 3 other related posts. I'm not keeping track of which posts get linked to. They just need to be very relevant.
  2. Every post also has a list of 5 internal links at the bottom, like "related posts" that are also relevant but I allow them to be a bit less relevant. I try to hit new and old posts to keep the spiders hitting the whole site.
  3. After publication, I search for older posts related to the topic and interlink back to the new post anywhere from once to 5 times.
This ensures there's a giant web of relevant internal linking, but also (due to #3) makes sure every single post receives at least one, if not more, internal links from other relevant pages.

I don't worry about page rank sculpting and content clusters and hubs as I do this. I just keep the juice flowing in every direction so the tide raises all of my boat-posts, and that the spiders always encounter relevant content and eventually hit every post again and again.
 
  1. Export your tags and their URLs
  2. Use a plugin that auto scans each post and inserts X number of links to such tags where it gets an exact word match
  3. Tags archives are all indexable if they have 3 or more posts in them
 
Huge opportunity for someone to build something with ai here to quicken this process. Link whisperer is good but with ai could become vaporware if someone has the programming stones to build something.
 
Ryuzaki said:
The way I handle this is three-fold:
  1. As every post is formatted and prepped for publication, it must link out to at least 2 or 3 other related posts. I'm not keeping track of which posts get linked to. They just need to be very relevant.
  2. Every post also has a list of 5 internal links at the bottom, like "related posts" that are also relevant but I allow them to be a bit less relevant. I try to hit new and old posts to keep the spiders hitting the whole site.
  3. After publication, I search for older posts related to the topic and interlink back to the new post anywhere from once to 5 times.
This ensures there's a giant web of relevant internal linking, but also (due to #3) makes sure every single post receives at least one, if not more, internal links from other relevant pages.

I don't worry about page rank sculpting and content clusters and hubs as I do this. I just keep the juice flowing in every direction so the tide raises all of my boat-posts, and that the spiders always encounter relevant content and eventually hit every post again and again.
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I use a similar approach. For your 2 - as an anchor I use key phrases for which that article/page ranks between 10-20 in Google (from gsc). For your 3 - you can use a free wp plugin wilo. It analyzes internal links to the page both quantity and quality and it suggests pages to link from, to that analysed page.
 
Ok, I just found out my interlinking sucked, so I googled, I YouTubed, I put a few hours in and the best thing I could find that was free is the plugin "Internal Link Juicer." It is not automated in the free version, but I went in on each of my blog posts and added the keywords I wanted it to associate the post with, and everywhere I had that text on my other posts, it automatically linked to my post.

This is not a commercial, just sharing what worked easiest for me and I am a noob.
 
I'm just starting out and I need some tips to get started the right way (I have a few posts but they suck at SEO optimization).

Some issues I have, link building on post, I'm mostly following the CCarter thread, 3 internal links for every 1 external, always linking below so I don't have to go back, and only come back when evaluating the rankings and thus linking to underperforming pages.

What amount of internal links do you place, does this amount work for you?.

Give me any information, even if it is very simple but that may be the doubt of others who want to follow the method, I'm learning about snippets now, trying to optimize as much as possible for SEO.

I have already prepared my key words and I intend to start soon, I will show results when I start.
 
Not sure if this belongs to the beginner's thread or this one.

Is it possible that internal linking (anchor text) creates keyword cannibalization?
(This is based on an actual site loved and hated by Google on a bi-weekly basis)

Let's say I have published an article about zero volume keyword "How to shave a fur coat with an electric razor" on my electric razors website. My article is the only one targeting this keyword.

My WP theme has a related posts carousel at the bottom of posts and this article is included in the carousel. Good for avoiding orphaned pages, right?

I also linked to the post from 3 related posts but I was lazy. Instead of figuring out how to add a contextual link, I added a bolded callout box between paragraphs - [Related reading: How to shave a fur coat with an electric razor]

So now I have:
- a post with a title, H1, and H2 "How to shave a fur coat with an electric razor"
- 6 posts with "How to shave a fur coat with an electric razor" in related posts carousel
- 3 posts with bolded [Related reading: How to shave a fur coat with an electric razor]

Is this enough to confuse Google and push the target blog post out of the top 100?
 
Sunshine said:
What amount of internal links do you place, does this amount work for you?.
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This kind of question is like asking "how long is a piece of string?" We don't have enough details to answer. How long is your content? I could tell you I do 12 internal links per post, and not tell you how long my content is, and my answer is also worthless. Just keep it relevant to the text and you'll be fine. If you simply need some kind of guidance, you could think of it as "I may include zero or up to 5 internal links per 500 words". That'd keep you in the zone of reasonable.

JanisG said:
Is it possible that internal linking (anchor text) creates keyword cannibalization?
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Not really. It's "technically" possible that the inclusion of a phrase, simply to use it as an anchor text, gives that page a chance to rank for that keyword. But it's not going to be optimized for it at all. I think you have zero reason to worry about that.
 
Hello everyone! For the first internal link on a page, are you creating it differently from the rest of the links? Is there something more intentional done with the first link, like anchor text or positioning it at the beginning of a sentence? Much appreciated.
 
My approach to automating internal linking is pretty simple at the core. I read various methods and had a few conversations about maintaining a topical map, using AI to identify relevant articles etc, but in the end I went for the simple method of adding a FULLTEXT index to my article table and using MATCH AGAINST queries to pick out my relevant linking targets.

My sites are bulk built, with each page built based on a single keyword, and I tend not to use Wordpress, so I have simple scripts to query my article database and spit out the results. The query I use to find my internal link targets is something like this:
Code: 
SELECT id, slug, MATCH(article) AGAINST ('$this_keyword') AS relevance FROM articles WHERE MATCH(article) AGAINST ('$this_keyword') ORDER BY relevance DESC LIMIT 0,$num_articles
So this uses the 'match' value generated by MySQL as a relevance score, and ranks the articles on that.

Next I insert the links into my content using another pretty simple method - just selecting random words in the article. Depending on the number of links I want to add to each article (I randomise it between 1-4) I select a random word at least xx words into the article, then select either the word next to it or the two words surrounding it, and use that fragment of text as my anchor. Then repeat x number of times.

This method is simple, probably dated, doesn't use buzzwords and AI, is not exciting or groundbreaking... but it just works. I have no problems getting huge sites indexed this way.
 
Éowyn said:
Hello everyone! For the first internal link on a page, are you creating it differently from the rest of the links? Is there something more intentional done with the first link, like anchor text or positioning it at the beginning of a sentence? Much appreciated.
Click to expand...
No. There's zero need to worry about this unless that first internal link serves a very specific purpose. Just link where it makes sense using natural and relevant language. The kind of thing you're describing has zero affect on anything.

The only consideration to know about is that if you link out to the same post twice, the first anchor text will be used and the 2nd ignored. And that Google has a patent for something called the Reasonable Surfer (I think it's called) concept where a link higher up the page is more likely to be clicked and more important, meaning it probably passes more page rank juice.
 
Can you have too many internal links going in to a post on your site? I have some posts that have around 30 internal links pointing to them - mostly varied anchor text, a few exact but mostly variations. The site has about 200 posts for context. Always wondered if you can over do things.
 
bartman said:
Can you have too many internal links going in to a post on your site? I have some posts that have around 30 internal links pointing to them - mostly varied anchor text, a few exact but mostly variations. The site has about 200 posts for context. Always wondered if you can over do things.
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I mean how many internal links do you think that Wikipedia has to some of its pages? I'd wager to say thousands in some cases.

Checking one of my sites that has 601 posts, 1 of the keywords most folks wouldn't target because it's rather difficult; It has 91 inbound internals - I rank 4th. Similarly, another post has 85 internals and I rank 5th.

As long as it's natural to internal to that page on your site - why not?

Personally, I've only ever seen gains from having more internals, not less.
 
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