Internal Link

While publishing was assumed to be enough for search, pages that never even got indexed piled up quietly. Eighty posts on a blog, with search traffic concentrated in the top five, and the other seventy-five buried three pages deep in a list.

That follows from how search engines find pages. They take a site address and move outward by following links, and a post sitting three pages into a list is effectively out of reach along that path. A page nothing links to is the same as a page that isn't there, no matter how good it is.

Internal linking is the work of laying that path by hand. Link a new post from a few existing posts that relate to it and it climbs onto the path.

One link carries four things at once.

1. The path to discovery — a search engine reaches a new page by following links.
2. Importance — a page receiving links from several places inside a site reads as an important page. A page two clicks from the front and a page five clicks from the front get treated differently with identical content.
3. Context — the anchor text, the words the link is attached to, carries what the receiving page is about. "Read more" transmits nothing; "on-page checklist" hands that phrase over as the receiving page's subject.
4. Human movement — it passes along someone who intended to read one post and leave.

Links run in two directions. When a post goes up, link to it from three or four related existing posts. Link only outward from the new post and the new post still receives nothing. Then link once from the new post to the hub post for that topic — a hub post tied to its related posts by links is a topic cluster — so both ends are connected.

Piling links up dilutes them. Twenty links to one page using the same anchor text do not carry twenty times the weight of one well-placed link. Links that repeat identically on every page carry little weight, while a link placed in body text alongside its context reads as more.

"Nothing internal links to this post. Link it from three related ones."

It was published but never got onto the path.

"Change the anchor from 'read more.' Those words hand over nothing about the destination."

The link text isn't carrying any context.

"Thirty links in the footer won't do much. They have to be in the body."

Repeated site-wide links and body links carry different weight.

At Pagedeck, Ravi opens three existing posts and links them to each new post as he publishes. Last quarter he found twenty-two posts with no inbound internal links and linked them, and fourteen of those appeared in search results within two months.