SEO's Game-Changing Weapon, Internal Linking

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Please note - "This newsletter might seem boring due to the lack of graphics, however it contains a lot of valuable information."

So let's start with today's topic "Internal Links - SEOs Game Changer Weapon"

We all know Internal links are useful for three main reasons:

??Internal links can be more important than backlinks in some cases.

??Backlinks are like the wires from a power plant to your house, and internal links like the wires from your circuit breaker to your outlets.

??Some types of internal links are more valuable than others, but they all work together to convey meaning, hierarchy, and authority to help search engines understand your website.

For this study, Zippy has looked at 23 million internal links across 1,800 websites, representing approximately 520,000 individual URLs. Then compared these to data from Google Search Console to determine search clicks for each URL.

A few caveats about the numbers:

Twenty-three million sounds like a lot of links, but it’s only a small portion of the trillions of links across the internet! A much larger study would provide greater accuracy.

This is mostly a correlation study. Remember that correlation isn’t causation (though it can be a solid hint!)

I recommend you consider any conclusions drawn from these numbers directionally useful but not necessarily scientific truth.

Internal Links Associated With More Google Traffic

As you might suspect, pages with more incoming internal links tend to get more traffic.

For example, in our dataset, URLs with 0-4 internal links only saw two clicks on average from Google Search, while URLs with 40-44 internal links saw four times that many.

But then a strange thing happens.

After a URL receives about 45-50 internal links, the effect reverses. Google traffic begins to decline as the number of internal links rises.

What’s going on?

Diving into the numbers, the most obvious explanations seems to be explained by the existence of navigational/sitewide links vs. unique links in the body text. When a page has 50, 100, or 400+ internal links pointing at it, there’s a good chance these URLs are linked in the navigation from every page on the site.

With sitewide links, the dataset often shows URLs with less traffic.

Does this mean navigation links are less effective than other types of links? Not necessarily.

As the number of links per URL increased, our dataset grew very spikey. Observationally, large, high-traffic sites tended to do very well with navigational links. At the same time, small-to-medium sites seemed to have less success.

But then why are more links associated with more traffic, at least up to a certain point?

Perhaps looking at anchor text provides more insight…

Anchor Text Variations Correlated With Search Traffic

When talking about anchor text, we’re talking about the words that make up the clickable part of the link.

Pages can have only a few anchor text variations pointing at them, or sometimes many. Popular pages on the internet typically have a wide variety of anchor text variations from external links.

The relationship between anchor text variety of internal links and Google search clicks was so strong that we ran the data three times. Even after eliminating nearly all the outliers (close to 50% of all URLs), the numbers kept increasing.

The numbers kept increasing, but the data became less reliable after a certain point. While it’s common to see pages with one, five, or even ten anchor text variations pointed at them, only a tiny percentage of URLs have 25 or more anchor text variations from internal links.

Regardless, URLs with a larger number of anchor text variations from internal links are highly correlated with more Google search traffic.

Speculating, this may help explain why pages with more internal links see more search traffic, but only to a point. One theory may be the raw number of links may be less important than the uniqueness of the links.

Naked URL Anchors and Google Traffic

Google’s SEO advises against using URLs as anchors,?telling webmasters to avoid?“Using the page’s URL as the anchor text in most cases.”

But does using URL anchors hurt your search traffic?

In our dataset, the answer was no harm at all.

Speculating again, perhaps this has more to do with anchor text variety than any usability or other Google ranking consideration. Many SEOs are known to use naked URLs as part of their overall linking strategy.

Empty Anchor Texts and Google Search

Google also tells us to use descriptive words in our anchor text.

Despite this, links often contain no anchor text whatsoever. Image links—which use the alt attribute as anchor text—are particularly bad at this.

In our dataset, over 6% of all links contained no anchor text, but was it associated with fewer clicks? Here’s the answer.

Statistically, the existence of empty anchor text from internal made no difference whatsoever.

This could be because—as previously mentioned—empty anchors are most often associated with image links, and image links are often accompanied by regular text links, which presumably have anchors!

How to Optimize Your Internal Links

While we can’t pretend to present a complete internal linking strategy based on this study, the data does hint at some possible best practices and optimizations.

1. More internal links are associated with higher traffic, but only to a point.
2. Sitewide/navigation links seem to have a powerful effect mostly on larger, high-authority sites. The effectiveness is less clear on small, lower-authority sites.
3. Anchor text variety is highly correlated with higher search traffic.
4. Naked URL anchors don’t seem to hurt and in fact, are associated with more traffic.
5. At least some exact match anchors are associated with significantly higher traffic.

"Most growth occurs when an internal force is guided toward a certain goal, and this is true for both humans and search engine optimization????" - Mithilesh Joshi

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