Internal Linking (Webinar)

How important are internal links in 2022, what are the mistakes that many websites make with internal linking and what are some of the key internal linking opportunities? That’s what we’re going to be covering in episode 26 of Old Guard vs New Blood.

Joining David Bain is Orit Mutznik from Forbes, Mags Sikora from Intrepid Digital, and Dixon Jones from Inlinks.

Please note – in light of events in Europe, this episode was recorded off-air and edited prior to broadcast. For more information, please read our statement below.

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Transcript

David Bain

What are some of the key internal linking opportunities in 2022. I am David Bain, your host today, and on this episode, we’re looking at internal linking. Covering topics like what internal linking strategies work best now and how to determine whether or not your internal linking is good or not so good. But before we get started, you may have picked up on the fact that this episode of the show wasn’t livestreamed. That’s a result of the conversation that Dixon and I have had with Majestic. Now, Old Guard versus New Blood is generally a lighthearted yet, we hope, informative show that we certainly intend to continue. However, as a result of conversations with Majestic, we’ve changed the format of this month’s episode.

To give you more detail, Majestic have a post in the blog saying with the ongoing developments of a humanitarian crisis in Europe precipitated by the invasion of Ukraine, we felt that it would be inappropriate to proceed with a livestream of the show today. You can check out the full blog post at blog.majestic.com and the blog post also includes a link to a great resource that SE Ranking have produced with a list of organizations that are seeking donations for Ukraine. Now, you can find that over at seranking.com/blog/stand-with-ukraine. All our thoughts are with the innocent victims of this horror.

One of the other differences in today’s episode, you may have noticed, is I’ve shuffled over from the producer’s chair to the host chair to allow our regular host, to dispatch his expansive knowledge of internal linking. So I’ve been looking forward to saying this, representing the Old Guard, Dixon. What’s your name and where do you come from?

Dixon Jones

Thanks, David, and I echo the thoughts that you and Majestic have made. It’s a horrendous situation and anything that we can do to stop the monster is welcome and I hope that the, but at the same time work must go on. We’ve got to carry on with life somehow. So thanks for taking over the hosting chair because I didn’t think I could handle too many different things in my head at the same time. But I’m Dixon Jones. I’m an ambassador, of course, for Majestic, but also I have another business internal, InLinks, which optimizes internal links within people’s websites. So it’s kind of my bread and butter, if you like.

David Bain

So that’s Dixon sitting comfortable in the Old Guard chair, but on the New Blood side are two ladies who have both actually been, according to my research, in the SEO game since around 2008, but that’s a lot more recent than Dixon. So they still qualify as new blood in this particular conversation. So may, first of all, Mags, tell us a little bit about you and what you do.

Mags Sikora

Yes. I’m Mags Sikora, I’m SEO expert with, as you already mentioned, 13 years of SEO experience. I specialize in travel SEO and, I would say especially, with working with large websites more than one million URLs. So I would say I specialize in scalable SEO solutions and, obviously, inspiring content. So this is, that’ll be my bread and butter and I’m really excited to be here, obviously.

David Bain

Oh, great to have you here, Mags, also with us, is Orit. Orit please introduce yourself.

Orit Mutznik

Hi David and everyone. Yes, I’m Orit, I’ve been in SEO since 2008, as David mentioned. I think that I would define my expertise as in-house, just because I’ve worked at big companies, basically since the beginning of my career. I’ve worked at companies like eToro, on the financial side and Siegfried, on the women’s fashion side and 888 and William Hill, on the gambling side. So yeah, my bread and butter has always been highly competitive industries. I like the challenge. Recently taken a new challenge with Forbes, just joined a month ago as director of International SEO at Forbes. Very excited. Big team, big challenge, excited.

David Bain

Oh, we’re very excited to have you all here as well. We say new blood, but you certainly got an incredible amount of experience and everyone in the panel there as well. So let’s get started, first of all, I think, with your opinion on the biggest mistake that brands make with their internal linking. So maybe, shall we shovel back to Dixon? Dixon what would you say is the biggest mistake that you see that many brands make with their internal linking?

Dixon Jones

I think the biggest mistake that I think people make is just adding links to the bottom of an article or around an, just having not necessarily contextually relevant, but certainly no sort of explanation as to why there’s other things there. Just putting links on a page really helps, I think, makes websites go backwards when it comes to try to understand a website. If there’s no logic for those links, it causes a bit of a problem and I think that’s probably the biggest thing from my point of view.

David Bain

So Mags, I see you writing away there and nodding your head and saying yes there as well.

Mags Sikora

Yes.

David Bain

Was that, it could be your answer as well or do you have something else in terms of a bigger mistake?

Mags Sikora

Yes, but I would probably add, as well, going straight away for massive mega navigation. This is something I’m not big fan of, of massive menus. The reason being is that, obviously, it’s for the same reasons you don’t have, it takes away the power of anchor text manipulation, but play with anchor text within your site. And it also makes those links less contextual as well. So in a way they, very often, the landing pages are linked from completely unrelevant landing pages. And overall, if the website, especially within travel, if the website doesn’t have mega menu, I would definitely not recommend doing that. Probably different story would be within the retail or etel websites, but that’s complete separate discussion. I would say mega menu would be, going straight away from mega menu would be the big interlinking mistake.

David Bain

So, Orit, I think I detected a very faint nod when Mags said mega menu isn’t the best place to start, certainly, in terms of internal linking. Would you agree with that? And also what is your biggest mistake as well?

Orit Mutznik

Yeah, don’t get me started on mega menus. Definitely. I’m with Mags here. Absolutely. Yeah. Having worked at ECOMS, I think that’s the worst thing to do and also the most difficult thing to stray away from. Mega menus really make the website architecture quite flat and this is something that, I’ve actually had a conversation specifically about this with John Mueller, the man himself, just as I was preparing for my talk in brightonSEO. When I was having him have a look at my website and I was discussing the mega menu, so I was trying to tell him but this is important, all of this is important and he was telling me, okay, so if everything is important, then nothing is important because you don’t give anything any type of priority and that changed my, completely, my outlook on how I look at website architecture and mega menu.

But, in fact, so I very much resonate to Mags here, but what I actually wanted to say is that I think the biggest mistakes that brands can do around internal linking is not give it the priority that it deserves, because I think a lot of websites put, for example, backlinks on a very high priority, whereas sometimes without any backlinks and just with proper architecture, which is achieved, of course, with internal links, you can get so much better results. I’ve seen websites rank really high for very competitive keywords, just because of this, just thanks to internal linking and, of course, without being done with a clear strategy in place. So that leads me to the second biggest mistake, I think, which is just putting links out there without a strategy and without much thought. So that will be the second one.

Dixon Jones

Well, can I come in with, on the mega menus things and the fact that Orit was having a conversation with John Mueller. It’s really interesting that he said that, because I can’t remember whether it was John Mueller or his predecessor, Matt Cutts, that once said a mega menu is not inherently bad, but it’s what you don’t say in that, what Googlers don’t say in that conversation. That was on one of the webinars that they do to everybody. They’re not inherently bad but, and it’s the but that didn’t get mentioned the first time round. It doesn’t have that context.

So, to your point of how many links, I don’t think that is the ideal way of looking at it. It’s a lack of context that it causes. Also, the old dilution of pager, although pagering is now very much buried so far into the system that it’s not necessarily the big thing, but it’s that lack of context. If you, Orit put it really well, Orit, John put it really well, if your page’s about everything, it’s about nothing. That’s the big dilemma for SEOs that want to rank for everything.

David Bain

What about the SEOs working with UX team and the UX team are thinking from a UX perspective, I want everything to be accessible directly from the homepage, I want all the links to be on there and just hover over your web or tap your finger to actually get access to those things straight away. If that’s the case, is it still possible to use, in old days it used to be things like Nofollow or are you perhaps considered JavaScript links or another form of links to make it less likely for search engines to be able to see and follow those links, is that still a possibility?

Orit Mutznik

No, I would definitely not go through with that. I think that the way to resolve the differences between UX and SEO, on that front, would be to test, essentially, if you actually put numbers and data behind your hypothesis, then you can, there’s no argument really. So at some point we’ve decided to do a test on three versions of the mega menu. So one, the normal one, the big one with everything in it. Then we have a middle ground, which is for example, top categories and subcategories or the top subcategories. And then we have a third version that’s completely stripped out and we have just top categories and not the other categories.

So putting that in the wild and seeing how that behaves from the UX perspective and then, well, the hope is that the, in my opinion, I’m for the middle ground approach, I would say. That’s something I would go with. So that points nicely to the subcategories, but on the other hand, not too incredibly strip down, but not incredibly full either. So I would go with that approach, but it’s all about the data. The data’s going to drive that decision. So it’s not even me arguing for SEO, it’s just telling the UX team, okay, let’s put all the hypothesis to the test and see what the data tells us.

Mags Sikora

I just wanted to add that I’m 100% with Orit on that, as well. And also if I may add that from it’s, absolutely, should be tested from UX perspective and it very much depends, as well, on the industry, which I already mentioned. When you think about, from travel, because my expertise is mostly travel SEO, you want to make sure that people really go straight away to the funnel and they really go to search. So in a way, very often within the travel industry, the mega menu can be actually distracting and can actually harm the performance of the site. Whereas, when you think about retail, Shopify collection pages, or the Demandware category pages. Absolutely. I think from browsing perspective, when people have to learn about the products a little bit more, I think it absolutely makes sense to have them there. So I think as you say, it should be absolutely tested from UX perspective and it depends very much on the industry type of the website.

David Bain

So what if you’ve got an SEO that is just getting started in a role and they’re certainly sold on the value of internal linking but they want to do some kind of audit on how effective the internal linking strategy is on their site. What’s the best place to start in terms of identifying the areas to focus on when it comes to internal linking?

Dixon Jones

One of the things that, a tool that I use that I like is actually Sitebulb, which is, it’s got some nice layouts for internal link structures and it shows the internal link structures in an interesting or a choice of interesting manners. And I think it is important to try and visualize the link structure if you’re trying to do an audit because it’s not always easy to look at one page and then see what’s happening. But one of the things that we’ve tried to do at InLinks now, is create a thing called an internal link score because it’s not just about the menu links and the links on the page. It’s the links that aren’t there, is the idea.

So if we can say, what are the important cornerstone pages and then work out all the link opportunities, and then we can work out which ones are actually linking. Then we’ve got this internal link score, which is quite a powerful way of seeing how far you’ve got to go. So there’s a whole load of things like orphan pages and other bits and pieces. But, for me, Sitebulb is useful and this internal link score, I think, is going to develop as a really useful metric to just say, how far I’ve got to go.

David Bain

What about yourself, Orit? What’s your preference in terms of software to identify internal links and missing internal link opportunities?

Orit Mutznik

I like Ahrefs. I think that it gives me a few dimensions on what I can do with the data. First of all, they have the straightforward internal link suggestions, which we can use. Second of all, I can use that to see, obviously, the page’s performance and the top pages and my rankings and everything else. So I can see which are my weakest links. Yeah, no pun intended, but my weakest links in terms of top pages. See which pages are linked the least within the website and that probably correlates, usually, correlates with the performance of the page as far as rankings and performance. So I would look at those weakest pages first and see, and come up with a strategy on how do I link them to strengthen them from stronger and relevant pages on the website. So, that’s what I would do, I would spot the weakest pages first, that are linked the least, from the website structure, there are audit tools that allow you to see how many links this page is getting and then you can add more links to that.

David Bain

And what are your thoughts Mags?

Mags Sikora

Okay. So my, I would say, is quite manual. What I do is that I look at the top performing pages. I looked at the ones which should be top performing pages from surgical news perspective and cures they target. And then I’m using Screaming Frog to understand what’s the current interlinking strategy on the site and then, based on the information I’m getting on the data I’m getting, I identify the best contextual content which should link to the pages with the highest opportunity. I hope I’d say that right.

David Bain

Okay. Sure. So that’s, I guess, identifying links that exist already. How do you identify where the opportunities are to create new internal links?

Dixon Jones

Well, I don’t have that problem because that’s what the tool does at InLinks, but you still have to identify which are your cornerstone pages and then the tool will read all the rest and see where you’ve talked about that concept on other web pages and help build those links. Which can still be done manually, it’s just hard, it’s hard to do at scale. So going through and finding all of the other times that you’ve talked about blue widgets, so you end up with a cornerstone page about blue widgets, the landing page.

And by the way, I think, on WordPress sites, people underestimate the potential power of category pages in this regard because by default category pages don’t have any descriptive texts, so you can’t write much content on a default WordPress category page. But if you get a round route with a plugin or a style or a template, you can then create a lot of static content and then boost it all up because all of your other things that you’re writing about that particular topic will all dramatically, naturally, link back to that category page as well. But it’s that case of saying, right, this is what I’m trying to rank for, I’ve got to go through the whole of the website. And one way to do it is just to go keyword cycle on your own site and see where you’ve mentioned those in Google, where Google thinks those ideas are and pick them out and then link within the text and that’s the contextual link.

David Bain

I love that idea of actually creating a more dynamic category page on WordPress because by default, as you say, it’s essentially just a lot of links that update all the time but if you can possibly actually add a bit of text using a plugin and then it almost looks like a dynamic piece of content that’s updated because your posts are updating. So it could be quite appealing for search engines there as well. Dixon, you produced a case study called 82% of Internal Linking Opportunities are Missed. That’s an incredible number of missed opportunities. Why is it so high?

Dixon Jones

Yeah, it’s actually a lot more than that. That was just so we were looked at around about 6,000 websites in the system that, but it was only looking at the pages where the website owners had identified and said, this page is one where we want to get links to because not all pages need links, let’s be honest about it. A lot of the stuff that we write is part of the story, but not the cornerstone for a money word, if you like. And so it was just looking at the web pages that SEOs had identified as pages that they wanted their internal links to and then it looked at how many links were already going in versus the ones that could be going in and then found that 82% were missing.

So, basically, what’s happening is that it’s very hard for a human being to manually go and find all of those links that could be there on, even, a modest size website. You can go around and if their website has got some rich content around, then it’s very difficult to remember where all those things are. And if you think about a journalist on the BBC, for example, they’re never going to be thinking about anybody else’s articles when they’re writing their own article, but of course they’re writing things that are going to be pertinent to a lot of other bits of content on the site, but they don’t know what that is. So they’re not putting links into other pages on there, but that’s what needs to happen. So you need some kind of system to cope with that, whether it’s a manual system or whether it’s a automated system, otherwise you’re going to miss, it would turn out, to miss 82% of all your link opportunities.

David Bain

So how do you actually go about identifying that landing page opportunity, that opportunity for that internal link, to link to? Do look at things like the quality of the unique content on that page? Do you look at perhaps keywords that are currently ranking for perhaps maybe 3, 4, 5 pages down on Google and there’s an opportunity to boost that higher? Are there other metrics that you look at or what are your thoughts on that?

Orit Mutznik

Yeah, so I think it’s, I’m happy that there’s a Dixon tool, the tool that Dixon has, of course, which is super smart and I have tried it myself, not recently, but I have definitely tried it. At the moment and the process that we’re going through, it’s quite manual because it’s, you do have plugins for WordPress, as you said, that the internal linking process with those would be just hyperlink a keyword whenever it appears with the same page over and over again, clearly not the best outcomes. So those plugins need to be either modified in some ways so it’s not incredibly robotic persistence or just do that manually and that’s what we’re doing. We’re basically doing that manually because we have different priorities when it comes to which pages we, what ranking, which pages need the attention.

So, basically, going through that manually. It’s not a huge process. It’s sometimes we just pick a batch of pages that we want to promote and then we think about all of our content and where, we have a list of the content, we see it all in front of us and we see which pages would be the right fit for which, for the pages that we want to link to. So it is manual work. It really depends on the site, on the size of the site, obviously, if you want to do it manually or not. But I do agree that a website with millions and millions and millions of pages might be incredibly problematic and maybe there is a need for a more scalable solution that will automate this, but in a smarter way.

David Bain

Got you. Mags, you mentioned that you’ve had quite a bit of experience in the travel sector or you were talking quite a bit about eCommerce and other sectors as well. How do the internal linking needs differ depending on the industry that you happen to be in? Mags, looking at the travel industry, are there any unique aspects of internal linking that are especially appropriate for the travel industry?

Mags Sikora

Mm-hmm (affirmative). I would say from, in travel industry, it has to be done on scale because when you think about it, when you think about hotel properties, for example, think about Spain, there’s thousands of hotel property pages you need to, from our… Let me tell you a story. So there is this interesting experience, and I had few years back. When I started work with travel company, which just for Britain counted around 300 different hotel property pages, they didn’t rank well for those. The pages were indexed, but they didn’t rank almost at all, which was quite surprising because the domain was very strong. The hotel properties were submitted with index and a side map. Obviously when I looked into the website, they were absolutely not linked to properly. When we added links, literally manual. What we did is that we divided those hotel properties by surge of volumes, by cues, which targets, sorry, by similar cues, surge volumes. And for half of those properties, we set up manual links within the website.

Within, it was within two weeks time, the ones which had links pointing to started really ranking already on that second and the third page, just with one or two links. So that was the proof to the business to show, okay, we actually need proper links and proper interlinking strategy to make it happen. But how you did it on scale within travel. Imagine you have those thousands of hotels. So the way it’s, the approach which I like the most and tested a few different solutions is that you look at your hotels by destinations and, of course, think about it, think about Barcelona, for example, it’s impossible to link to all hotels within Barcelona. It’s thousands of properties. How do you make sure you are definitely linking to the hotels which matters to you the most. And you are making sure that you are not omitting the hotels which are medium importance, outside. And what about the rest? So another few hundred properties.

So the best approach from my experience is that absolutely, of course, you feature those hotel properties, the ones which matters the most on your destination landing pages. So if we’re talking about Barcelona, you are linking nicely down to those featured hotels in Barcelona. But you also have to make sure that every single hotel property’s linked to, otherwise, it will not rank. Absolutely not rank at all, even though the content is great. So what we do is that we create HTML side maps for every single destination around the word and we link from those destination pages to individual hotel property side map for that specific destination. It means that, of course, Google comes to this, let’s say Barcelona page, sees Barcelona page, understands, okay, these are the featured hotels, the most important ones. But then Google also finds a single link to the HTML sign up for Barcelona goes there and discovers all the hotel properties, which are also featured on the site. And this is maybe not ideal solution, but is the best solution I could come up with for a massive website.

David Bain

I love that and it certainly shows that, that kind of tactic could be applied for say an eCommerce site as well. If you identified certain categories and certain items that you sold within those categories were selling particularly well or particularly profitable, then you could run some kind of script to identify those particular items and automatically link to those items and hopefully ensure that your website’s more profitable and hopefully had a higher conversion rate as a result of doing that as well. Orit, you’ve recently started as SEO director for Forbes. Obviously, a massive news type site. Does internal linking have to be largely automated for that size of site or can you build in good internal linking practice with journalists, for instance, when they’re creating articles?

Orit Mutznik

Right, so Forbes is quite huge, so the department that I’m responsible for is the advisor side of Forbes. Recommending financial services, comparing financial services, so that’s my territory. So just if I speak about comparing financial services, so it’s about different areas of comparison. So, because we have, it’s not small but still finite number of areas to compare. So this doesn’t make it a huge task to interlink between them. This is why we still do this manually and we keep the context quite strong. So in every page, on every sector that we compare within it, so we make sure that the links are all within that cluster or within that topic. So our internal linking is very topical. So we don’t link to, I don’t know, car insurance from pet insurance, things like that. So we keep it very tight and because we keep it tight and quite selective, also adding to that pages that we want to push through those internal linkings.

So it doesn’t become a mammoth task as you would imagine being, but we can do that automatically, as well. As I said, we have to have control because we have our goals, which is to push a specific page or the other, and push the page for contextual relevance as well. Which I think is really important for ranking a website as well, because this also overlaps with e-comm as well and the way I approach that internal linking strategy in e-comm. Adding those internal links, especially on category pages, when there’s not a lot to actually write about, people just want to see the products, they don’t care about reading an article or something like that. So completely different. So the internal links actually act as a way to increase the context of the page. So I don’t really, so that actually helps me to add something on the page, which is not actual pictures of products. So there, the internal links serve a massive purpose in how the page becomes contextually relevant and in that case, extremely, keeping it, again, very tight on the topical relevance.

David Bain

So some very good tips there about optimizing your internal linking for large sites. Dixon, you’ve mentioned WordPress already. So, maybe focusing a little bit about smaller sites. You talked about the possibility of maybe using a plugin to add some text to a category page but what about specifically internal linking? I remember years ago using a plugin, that I remember the name of called YARPP, Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. Is there a decent WordPress plugin, a better, more up to date plugin that exists nowadays that can really enhance your internal linking on WordPress?

Dixon Jones

I think YARPP still goes, tries to find some related posts and stuff. I think that’s still there. And then Link Whisper is another one that is, as Mags says, is exact mac chain text. So it’s not ideal really, cause it’s just, or it might be ideal, I’ve not used it, so I can’t comment too much. But I think one of the things that you can do, what I’ve done on one of my blogs is set three different template pages. So when I write a post, I can choose a different template depending on how important I think the article is. So if it’s a normal article, the default template will, on the right hand side, list, pick out my cornerstone things, because I’ve got these guide for this and guide for that and guide for that.

These are the ones I really would like people to go and see, but then it’ll have the category menu of all the categories and things. Then if it becomes more important, it takes away the category menu. So that there’s less links to everything else and it’s focusing more down to the three standout things that I want people to do. And then if I got something really important, I’ve just got this plain theme. Which takes away all of this stuff on the outside and, basically, any links are sort of coming into that idea and that’s how I do it at the menu level.

But it’s still the contextual level, I think, as Orit says, really there is an advantage of having that cluster system that seems to be part of the business model it falls, where Orit’s in charge of the financial section there. So therefore she’s naturally going to link within her silo, if you like, but it’s not compulsory. I’m guessing it’s not compulsory. And I think that’s the best way of dealing with clusters or silos because what I don’t really like is a physical silo where you can’t link outside that silo. You have to link within the silo and then either by decree or by technology. And that, I think, is not as useful as a leaky bucket silo where you can still link out to other ideas, whether it’s contextually relevant because I think really context is really around about the sentence around the link, really. That’s all Google needs to get the context.

It doesn’t need, it’s not just anchor text, but it’s, with things like mum and stuff, it’s the way in which it talks about those related topics and whether they’ve got an of or an on or an ann or whatever. And I think that, that is important that you link where it is important across your site. But yes, this clustering around a theme can be really powerful as long as there is a page at the top of this theme that is the big money, the big ticket item, I suppose.

Orit Mutznik

Yeah, a 100%. I also want to add to what Dixon said that on that freedom, I a 100% agree. So for example, we have different pages that review a provider, for example, some kind of insurance, and we add the information that they also have different types of insurance and then we would link into our different types of insurance that we recommend. So it’s definitely not something that is a forced system, where we have to link into the silo. It’s a matter of it comes per need. It comes per context, whereas, I think that the best kind of internal link, in general, is the one that provides the best kind of information in context. So definitely not afraid to use that.

David Bain

What about internal links to your homepage? Is it sufficient just to link to your homepage, cross-site from an image, your logo, or is it more effective to try and incorporate some kind of keyword rich link to your homepage as well?

Orit Mutznik

I would sort that with breadcrumbs, really. I think breadcrumbs just cover that with the link on the logo, as well.

Mags Sikora

I would say I’m a big fan of targeting the homepage, just purely with the brand name. Obviously, probably this becomes quite challenging if your brand is for example, Cheapflights, and you want to make sure that you rank for this keyword. So probably incorporating the name within the breadcrumb would be great, but probably logo, obviously, would else I would have to say then, just the brand name, but I think that’s it really from what I would like to add here.

Dixon Jones

I think, for me, the idea is to make sure that the brand, maybe this is more of a marketing positioning question than an internal links question, but trying to get your brand closely associated with the edge to your main topic that the business is about, is a key thing. I mean, Nike is about, well, is about sport wear and you know it and if you can get your brand so closely associated with a concept, then that’s great because you’ve got a really good chance of your homepage ranking when somebody typed in the concept. It’s not an easy thing to do, especially, if you’re a small business, but it’s certainly a worthy goal because your brand needs to say something about you and it may as well say something that a search engine can understand.

Mags Sikora

Yes, I remember at Expedia, we were want to make sure that the brand Expedia is associate with travel and we actually just run for travel keywords. So in this, for this goal, we were making sure that each press release the word Expedia and the travel word is actually within one sentence. I don’t know if they still practiced that and how they trying to optimize towards this goal to rank for travel but this is what we did a few years back, quite a long time ago.

David Bain

Have any of you demonstrated, is that an internal link from the main body content will drive more authority compared with an internal link from footer sections or other sections of a page?

Dixon Jones

So there’s an interesting piece, a long time back, that Google went from page rank to reasonable surfer, which is trying to have algorithms that will treat a link on a page that somebody is likely to click on as more important than links on a page that people are not likely to click on. This is a long time back and this is definitely old school, but they never were very specific about what somebody was more likely to click on than another. Is it a menu link or is it an in-content link?

I think the general feeling these days is that context is key and you get the context in the body text. So a body text link allows a search engine to better understand what the meaning and the purpose of that link is. Navigational link, yes, it can be important but it’s, Google, well, Google in its quality rate of guidelines, talks about body content as separate to navigational content and third party content or something like that. I don’t know what the three types of content are. And it asks the quality gate raters to really pay attention to that body content as distinct from the other bits. So I think there is a evidence that Google will want to treat body text links with more, or body text content and therefore the links within them, with more relevance than the other stuff around.

David Bain

Orit, I see you nodding away there. Is there anything you’d like to add to that?

Orit Mutznik

Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. I think that there’ve been countless tests done around this and with the countless talks that Google had with people just emphasizing, if this links matters to you put it in the body text. And also around the test being done, I remember quite a few of them, actually seeing that Google would ignore a link for ranking purposes in the top navigation or in the footer. However, so I think there are two different purposes here in the navigation, like top navigation, footer. The links, for me at least, are there for crawling purposes and not for ranking purposes.

Orit Mutznik

So for crawling and understanding the overall context of the website. If I actually want to give value to a link, then I will put it in the body context. So I would produce a page around it and make sure that I link it from the top navigation or from the footer, et cetera. But I don’t count on a page, like on the value of an internal link from navigation. I provide lots of other signals as well from producing the pages, I said, to linking to that page and giving Google all of the rest of the scale of attention that I could possibly give to that page.

David Bain

Mags, you agree that if you want to give value to a link, you’ll include it in the body section?

Mags Sikora

Absolutely. And this is, I think, this is very much connected with that mega menu conversation we had at the beginning. So yes, I would say if I want to make sure that the anchor text is counted and has the right weight-in, I would say the more likely the user can see the link and maybe click on the link, as Dixon mentioned, will give this link more value.

David Bain

So we started out this episode by asking each of you about the biggest mistake that brands make with internal linking. Let’s finish off by getting you to share your number one internal linking tip. So if I can get you to share your tip and then please share details of where our listeners can get a hold of you. So let’s go back to Dixon for the first one. So Dixon, what would be your number one internal linking tip?

Dixon Jones

Oh, well, I don’t want to just say, oh try InLinks, although it does have a free option. So do have a look at inlinks.net and see if it’s for you. But I think the biggest opportunity is just your landing pages, just find all of the other mentions of that particular important keyword for you that’s in your website and in the body text, link it through to the page that you think should be ranking for that particular phrase and I think that’s, basically, an easy win.

David Bain

And where’s the best place that people can find you online?

Dixon Jones

Oh, inlinks.net, I think, is probably the best place to go for all of this stuff.

David Bain

So, Orit, what is your number one internal linking tip?

Orit Mutznik

I think that the best tip that I can give is to have a strategy behind it, to do your research behind it, to combine your keyword research with it. So when you think about how you’re going to produce a page, think about the internal linking opportunities as well. Don’t leave, try not to leave that for later. Better do that sooner than later so you can accommodate because clearly there’s more value to a page when it goes live with all the information and all of the links within versus updating that in the future. Google is no fool. So clearly we’ve been adding those internal links for specific purposes. So if you can, do think about internal links when you’re producing the content. But if you are at the point where you’re optimizing, still, I would refer you back to the research and even if the page already exists, you’ve already done the research from the get-go. Go back to the research and see how you can best accommodate those internal links in the best content that’s suited for them.

David Bain

Great thoughts and what site or social media handle would you like to share with our listener?

Orit Mutznik

I’m on Twitter, sharing mostly memes and jokes when times are better, doing that, but some SEO thoughts now and then.

David Bain

And what’s your handle?

Orit Mutznik

Orit S-I-M-U. OritSiMu, that’s my handle.

David Bain

And last but not least, Mags. Mags, what is your number one internal linking tip?

Mags Sikora

Okay, so that would be probably a quick win. Identify top pages, all relevant keywords for those top pages. Look into search console, what landing pages already create impressions for those relevant keywords and those which are not your top pages, make sure that they link to your top pages from those anchored text. Would you identify those top keywords. I hope that makes sense, but that usually works really lovely.

David Bain

And where can people find you online?

Mags Sikora

I’m on sheknowsdigital.com and Twitter, MagsSikora.

Dixon Jones

And Mags, I’d just like to say as well while we’re here. Thanks very much for what you’re doing. I know you’re down in Poland, quite close to the border there. So thanks for all the work that you’re doing down there.

Mags Sikora

Thank you so much. We obviously stand with Ukraine.

Dixon Jones

It’s impressive to see.

Mags Sikora

Thank you very much. Difficult times, but we have to all go through this and help Ukraine.

David Bain

Couldn’t say it any better myself. Really appreciate you all coming on, Mags, Orit, Dixon. Really great episodes. I’ve been your host, David Bain. Here’s hoping that by the time we meet again, the war is over. Ukraine’s free. We’ll let you know at blog.majestic.com as to how we’re proceeding with the future episodes. Thank you so much for listening. Take care. Bye bye for now.

Livestream Statement

Livestream Cancelled – Majestic has been pleased to host “Old Guard, New Blood” since early 2020. We have enjoyed being a part of a light-hearted, yet informative show and intend for it to continue. With the ongoing development of a humanitarian crisis in Europe precipitated by the Invasion of Ukraine, we felt that it would be inappropriate to proceed with a livestream of the show today. We recognize that people will seek to respond to these events in different ways. We are sorry for those who may be disappointed by the postponement of the show. We are looking into potential alternative arrangements for this content and hope to update this page when appropriate.

Should you wish to support the Ukrainian people in their struggle, SERanking have produced a list of organisations seeking donations for Ukraine.

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