Episode 16: Ultimate Guide to Backlinks, Link Building, and Internal Linking – Part 2

Episode Transcript

Ashley Segura: So we just wrapped up an entire episode going over backlinks, what they are, how to build links to your sites. And now I really want to pivot and talk about internal linking because that’s a huge piece of the linking strategy.

So can you start us off by really explaining some of the best practices for what internal linking is and how it makes a difference when you’re developing an SEO strategy?

Arsen Rabinovich: Right. So, you know, there’s a few different types of internal linking and why we do this most frequently is the one that you notice as you’re reading through an article or a document on the website, you have a link pointing somewhere else, there’s an anchor text, with the highlighted part of the link, the clickable part of the link is called the anchor text.

Usually there’s words there and that’s, you know, most of the time should be. Other than click here or read more should be descriptive text. And that usually points to a different page on your website. So if I’m reading about, so I have an article about red widgets, and then in there I say, well, there’s all kinds of widgets that we have on our website.

we have red widgets and red widgets would be the anchor text and the link pointing to a page on my website where I have red widgets, right? so the anchor text part of the link. Google uses that to understand the context for what the page that you’re pointing to, or the document that you’re pointing this link to is going to be about, and that also helps the user, right?

Uh, because, uh, as I’m reading through a document, instead of click here, I’m getting a red widget. So I know, Hey. If I click on this, I’m going to see an article about red widgets. I might want to skip this for now, or I might want to look at it now. And then, or later, um, when Google crawls through your website and goes through, through your pages, uh, it sees these links and it processes links differently based on, on where these links appear within the document.

Um, Google has, uh, this, uh, concept of. Links that are, let’s say in the footer or in the sidebar are most likely going to get less clicks or are less important than the links that appear within the document, the body of the document itself. Um, so, uh, Google uh, changes the way.

It, uh, understands what the link is and what kind of, uh, and how to treat that link based on where that link appears within a document and what kind of a link is it surrounded by context by text? Is it within the paragraph or is it just a block of links? And typically that you see at the bottom of a post like other posts that you might like.

There’s just the box of links, right? Um, so those are internal links, essentially.

Ashley Segura: Okay. So you mentioned the click here and that’s the, as a user, that’s the kind of links that I see on a piece of content the most, like if you want to learn more, if you want to see this product click here. So does that mean using click here is not ideal for the anchor text of your internal links?

Arsen Rabinovich: And so it depends on what you’re doing, but most of the time I would say yes, you want to have descriptive anchor text so that user understands where they’re going. Right. Uh, so you bring context to it. Um, so instead of read more or click here, unless you’re like, okay, so let’s say it’s like a. Uh, a category page and you have little excerpts about your content or a product category page where you have a listing of a bunch of different products.

And then at the bottom of each little excerpt, you might have like read more or learn more, and those are fine because those are just like. Let’s call them navigational directional links, right? Uh, there’s not gonna be much authority or much contextual signals that are passed through those links. Uh, Google is just gonna see them as connecting.

Like, here’s where you can read more about this piece, right? Uh, if I was to optimize an excerpt about blue widgets and then instead of writing, click here, I would read more about green widgets or blue widgets, whatever it is. Right. Uh, to give a little bit of context so that Google end users understand that, you know, where I’m about to click is going to be more information about this.

Ashley Segura: Okay. So say you’re starting from the beginning, you have a new piece of content that you’re putting together and you’re trying to figure out what links to include, is there like a. Minimum amount of internal links that a piece of content should have, like based on word count or

Arsen Rabinovich: no, we never want to look at it from a ratio or word count perspective.

It’s what makes sense. You want to optimize for the user. So if you’re writing a document and you feel like, Hey, I can really bring a lot of information or education. Uh, to the user as they’re reading about this topic that I’m covering, uh, by referencing other documents on my website, uh, to connect the dots.

So let’s say I have a blog post about, uh, potato soup, right? A recipe about potato soup, uh, and within the potato soup recipe, I have. Uh, you know, the instructions that you have to peel these potatoes. Uh, and then I have an article on my website that talks about a process of how to peel potatoes efficiently.

I don’t know, I’m making this stuff up. Um, so within that paragraph, you know, you want to peel these potatoes, to learn more on how to peel potatoes properly, how to peel potatoes properly. Uh, would be the anchor text, and I would reference the document. So as the user, as the reader goes through this recipe, and they’re like, okay, I have to peel these potatoes.

Maybe I don’t know how to peel potatoes, but that’s available for me right within the document. Uh, so from a user perspective, that’s very helpful. Right. And the word helpful here is very important. Uh, at the same time, when Google crawls through this document, Google starts understanding that, Hey, uh, the writer or, the content creator, uh, wrote this piece of content.

And there is enough links in here. Uh, to contextually relevant, other pieces of content that either compliment, reinforce, or support, or provide more knowledge and information around the topic that I’m covering. Uh, so there’s no minimum or maximum. Uh, you definitely want to have internal links because that’s how Google connects the dots.

There’s other stuff that links are good for. So there’s like, you know, uh, breadcrumbs, which are the links on top. Uh, those are, designed to provide the user with logical navigational paths throughout the documents. And Google also looks at that to understand how documents are connected on your website.

So internal links serve a lot of different purposes.

Ashley Segura: Okay, so then if I have a piece of content that’s already written, I’ve added in some internal links for it. Let’s use the, Potato soup recipe on like how to better slice potatoes. Now within that post, should I have links to like a whole nother relevant?

Like how deep do you need to set up a user flow and experience for a specific topic, especially since we’re talking about helpful here, because now the content that we produce needs to be quote unquote, like extraordinarily helpful.

Arsen Rabinovich: Right. Um, you know, and, and that’s where it kind of is. Uh, it’s one of those things where you have to figure that out, right?

If, you have enough resources to link to internally, you don’t want to just link stuff just for the sake of linking stuff, right? Uh, but if you have resources to link to and where the link appears, I typically would recommend if you are going to link to other resources, you want to make sure that’s within the body of the post.

If you have other potato soup recipes, those can go at the bottom of the post and you can have them as a, as a, just a block of links on Google. Google will understand that, Hey, these are other potato soup recipes, or you can add value and context to those. And you can say, here’s the, you know, my big potato soup, which is really awesome.

And whatever, you know, I love making it because it’s baked potatoes or whatever, right. Or you can just have, you know, uh, more potato soups you’d like, and then just links, right. Um, it’s up to you. As a content creator to create that web, those connectors based on the content and the information that you have within your, your blog, within your ecosystem.

Ashley Segura: So then it’s not something that necessarily is developed in your pre content creation strategy. It’s more of develop the content that’s within your ecosystem. Within your current strategy and your current plan. But part of optimizing that piece of content is placing those internal links in there where it makes sense to do so.

Arsen Rabinovich: Right. So, you know, if I’m trying to help a document move up in rankings and I want to bring more attention to this document, I would probably spend more time on building internal links to this document instead of from this document. and I would look at other pieces of content on my website, and approach it from a perspective of, if I am going to link to this post, which other posts on my website, which other documents on my website are contextually relevant.

To this post. So if I’m linking to my new post about potato soup, I might want to link to it from, other potato soups or other potato dishes, or something that you might serve with potato soup, right? you want to bring more links in there. the anchor text that you want to use when you’re building those internal links to the post that you want to improve in rankings should be descriptive.

The anchor text should be close to the keyword that you’re targeting or the topic that you’re covering. So if I’m linking internally from, I don’t know, a method of peeling potatoes, a blog post, here’s how to peel potatoes. And I’m going to link to my potato soup.

Uh, you know, one of my favorite dishes is this potato soup that I’ve made, uh, you know, so many times or whatever, have you. And I would use that potato soup recipe as the anchor text pointing to the document that I’m trying to improve rankings on, right? So the anchor text should come as close as possible to either the primary secondary keywords that you’re targeting or towards the topic, the general topic that you’re covering there.

Ashley Segura: Okay, that makes sense. A lot of these examples is a piece of content to a piece of content, but what if you have a piece of content that’s getting a lot of traffic and you want to funnel and channel that traffic into sales or conversion pages? Because yeah, traffic is great, but at the end of the day, you need some kind of conversion.

So is there a way to do it where it isn’t so spammy to then in this high trafficking piece of content, that’s more of a how to informational intent, insert some commercial intent links.

Arsen Rabinovich: Yeah. I mean, look, you can easily insert commercial. It doesn’t have to be, uh, just informational. So if I’m selling potatoes and I have a recipe portion of my website, my primary focus is e commerce and I’m selling potatoes, and I have a blog.

On my e commerce site that I publish recipes on, I can easily, link to my, russet potato, product page from my potato soup recipe, right. where I talk about which best potatoes to use for the soup. I can say these russet potatoes. Are the best type of potatoes to use for the soup.

And then the russet potatoes would link to, my commercial intent page, my product page, and that’s perfectly fine. it’s helpful to the user, right? Because they’ll be like, Oh, I can now buy this, right? We got to think of primary secondary intent. but you can have two different, you can have informational intent as primary.

I’m here to learn about potato soup. And the secondary intent, would be, I need to buy. Potatoes for the soup right now that I’ve learned what I need to make. and you’re accommodating that with your content and your internal links. So you’re definitely being helpful in that situation.

Ashley Segura: How do you figure out the intent though? Because there’s lots of instances to where you create a piece of content or you have an old piece of content that is ranking and is probably your best piece of content, and now you want to pivot with it. But how do you understand? Where and why that traffic is coming from in the first place, like, how do you backpedal that?

Arsen Rabinovich: Um, just to make sure I understand the question. So you, you already have a piece of content that’s doing very, very well. Yes. Uh, and it’s getting traffic and you want to utilize, you want to funnel that traffic to other parts of your website.

Ashley Segura: Is

Arsen Rabinovich: that

Ashley Segura: the

Arsen Rabinovich: 

Ashley Segura: The intent behind it, like why it’s getting traffic in.

Cause you know, when you’re putting together internal link strategies and now trying to put a little bit more of a transactional link inside of something that more informational, there needs to be a really clear intent of, you know, if they’re landing on potato soup and you send them to a page of, um, kitchen countertops, that’s Right.

Arsen Rabinovich: But why would your potato soup, post be linking to kitchen countertops? Right. So if somebody who’s looking for potato soup recipe is definitely not interested in countertops. Right. So it has to make sense. And that’s where this whole thing kind of comes together, right?

You want to make sure that things are contextually relevant. So I wouldn’t necessarily, link from an article that talks about, repairing transmissions to a page on my website that talks about baby names, right? Those two things kind of don’t go together. And Google understands that, right? Cause Google will look at that and be like, yeah, this link doesn’t really make sense.

We’re going to ignore that. So No harm is going to come to you from it, from an SEO perspective. Okay. But it’s also not doing you any good, right? So no harm, but also no benefit. so if I do have a post on my website and it’s doing very well, and let’s say I’m monetizing, based off of ad, views, right.

and I see that people who are coming to this post are interested in the recipe, I will want to funnel them through my website to maybe other. Soups that have potato, because we know they’re interested in there or other potato dishes. Or, how to serve potato soup or, other side dishes that you might want to serve with potato soup, how to store it.

Right. Uh, um, how to freeze. So like there’s definitely other things. And then also this is like a part of that whole clustering. Process, right? like you want to make sure that content that’s similar to each other is clustered together, right? So like your categories, your taxonomies come into play here.

So I wouldn’t necessarily say that, you know, you want to just funnel traffic just for the sake of funneling, because we know that, uh, if they land a potato soup and you have a link to your kitchen countertops article, if they do click on it, they’re probably going to drop off because that’s not what they’re here for, right?

That wasn’t the initial intent, right? um, hopefully that answered the question.

Ashley Segura: yeah, no, it definitely did, especially from the intent perspective. Uh, you touched on something really important though, on like, it being negative for SEO and with the spam update and everyone’s kind of terrified about making any big changes.

So for internal linking, Are there any spamming practices to avoid or any, like you just talked about, from user experience? Perspective, which is great. Like what could actually hurt the site or is there anything when it comes to I haven’t,

Arsen Rabinovich: I haven’t encountered anything from an internal link perspective that can potentially harm a website unless you’re like doing something really, really weird.

Uh, but internally are fairly harmless because you’re sending people just from one page on your website to another page on your website. Uh, having said that, uh, you know, you can have too many links on a page. I haven’t seen this done in a while, usually, uh, very spammy, uh, websites will have a lot of links because they’re doing it through some automated process, uh, some kind of a plugin that just creates links based on like, Oh, I found this word potato in this article, and I’m going to link it to something that has potatoes on this other article on your website.

And I would generally avoid that just because. There is some, and I take it back, there is something bad because you can create confusing links, right? Um, so you can accidentally put, you know, point a link, uh, from a potato soup article, uh, to a split pea soup.

Right. the anchor text will say like tomato soup, right. But it’s pointing to, and then Google is going to look at it and say, okay, I’m confused, because the contextual signal that you’re showing me here from the anchor text tells me that the page that I’m going to visit is about tomato soup, but when they land there, it’s not.

So this is probably going to be also the bad experience for the user once they bring the user to your site. So there is, there is going to be other things that happen from it. Are they, are they direct or supporting signals? We, you know, I don’t know, uh, but I’ve seen this happen and we have cleaned this up in the internal linking audits that we’ve done.

Uh, where there was a lot of focus, confusing signals, uh, or focus, diluting signals internally.

Ashley Segura: And I guess it’s kind of also relative to the content and how much content on the page, because if you think of the, like the nerd wallet sites or the review sites where there’s 30 different internal links all to different products, but they have a paragraph about the product and then the, see more about the product.

And so those make sense from a user perspective. Right. I know last episode we did all about backlinks, but since we’re talking about spamming practices, they kind of go hand in hand with the latest Google updates. Is there anything to be concerned about when you’re trying to build links? Cause way back in the day, you know, there was spammy link practices and then we had penguin and all, everything kind of like, but where are we at now from like an ethical and safe perspective to be able to build links?

Arsen Rabinovich: So from a backlink perspective, you know, I haven’t seen, and we used to do a lot of cleanup, when Google used to send out manual actions, people call these penalties. we used to do a lot, we made a lot of money back in the day. doing this, brands would do, you know, weird link building practices.

Google wasn’t happy. Google would give them, an action and then we would come in and start cleaning that up for them and submitting, reconsideration requests. I have not seen, a manual action. applied to a website in a very long time. Not saying that it hasn’t. I’m sure Google still gives them out.

If you’re really blatantly trying to, gain the algorithm by building thousands and thousands of spammy, shady links, yeah, you’ll probably going to raise a few red flags for Google and you will get a manual action, but the way it works now is Google just doesn’t, you know, if you have a link that doesn’t make sense to Google, Google just ignores it.

it’s not a part of the calculation and we don’t know, we still don’t know how many of the, so if let’s say I have a thousand links pointing to a page, I don’t know out of those thousand links, how many are actually useful, right? How many Google actually uses in its calculation? It could be two, it could be a hundred.

We don’t know which ones we don’t know. Right. Um, so you really can’t, uh, harm your site unless you’re, really, really have to try to harm your own website or, you know, uh, to, to get there. uh, you know, there is other, you know, issues that come with this and, you know, you’re building these links and you kind of, if you’re storing things against the wall and hoping that they stay going, they help, uh, your, you know, we talk about building links with a purpose.

Right. There’s always, you shouldn’t just do it just to do it. It should be very purposeful. And when you approach it from a purposeful perspective, and these things can be applied with two internal links, you got to approach it from, from a purposeful perspective, right? How helpful are these links, uh, to the user?

Uh, when it’s internal links to the navigation of the website, uh, to the crawling process from Google, because Google also crawls your website based on links and how things are connected on your website. So you can have, uh, orphan pages. You can have a page on your website that has zero internal links pointing to it.

Uh, and Google, other than being your sitemap, Google has no other way of. Crawling or getting to that link. And Google understands that, that if there’s no internal links to one page, that page is probably not very important and it’s not going to be treated importantly. If you have a page on like your homepage is probably the most important page on your website, because you know, if the information architecture is proper, all of the internal linkings is leading to the homepage upwards, right?

Um, so there’s a different approach, but I don’t think you can harm yourself unless you really, really, really want to.

Ashley Segura: Okay. That makes a lot of sense. Is there specific tools that you can use? Cause this is something that I see on client sites all the time. When we’ll go in and see that internal links are broken or, you know, it was set up to pages that used to be or pieces of content that used to be there.

And then they change the URLs or whatever the heck happened. So are there specific tools that you use to figure out what kind of broken internal links are on a piece of content?

Arsen Rabinovich: Right. So any crawler, screaming frog, they will give you an internal link report, and you can analyze links, you can see where the link is placed, what kind of link it is, whether it’s an image link, what’s the anchor text, and you can easily audit your links that way.

you do have to, there’s a learning curve with those tools that these are crawlers and they’re not super easy to use, SEMrush. has a really interesting, internal link, scoring and crawling portion of their auditor, which I really like to use. they assign an internal link, page rank, which helps you kind of determine, importance of a page.

Based on the internal links that are pointing to that page. So when you’re auditing, it makes your life a little bit easier because you don’t have to like try to count, like how many leads do I have pointing to this page? What kind of links are they? Are they links from categories or are they just links from sidebars or are they links from, actual body of the post?

Ahrefs has something in their crawler to, link. Whisper is a WordPress plugin. you know, we just recently recorded a quick video on how to do your own little internal link audits using link. Whisper. If you have a WordPress blog. you can easily install even the free version of link whisper.

it’s going to crawl through the website and it’s going to give you all of your internal links and you can easily sort the pages in the admin and basically say, show me all of the pages on my website that have the least amount of internal links.

And then you can click in them and then you can see what the anchor texts are. It’s a little bit of a longer process, but it’s much easier on the brain. You know, there’s no learning curve to the way it’s screaming frog or side bulb and it sits right inside of your, WordPress installation.

Ashley Segura: Yeah, that definitely sounds like an easier option to go through and identify. Um, as we wrap up, I’d love to hear, I know you already dropped a secret sauce with the backlinks, but when it comes to internal linking, what is your secret sauce, what strategy are you using right now, or you just dropped a tool that you love, but do you have any tips?

Arsen Rabinovich: Um, yeah, you know, you definitely want to build internal links. and this is something that I teach in my coaching. you definitely want To when you’re building internal links to a document, you want to build internal links from pages on your website that are contextually relevant to, the post that you’re building links to.

And one of the best ways to find, those pages on your website is to use Google. there’s a site colon command search operator inside of Google that you can put right into the search bar and you can type in site, S I T E colon and then your website name and Google is going to show you a list of all of the pages.

Just from your website? And Google will show you in terms of authority or popularity. like your homepage will be at the top and then the worst pages will be at the bottom. So think just like a search result from Google, but just from your website.

So when I do that. I can go back into that search box and I type in site colon, you know, arson’s awesome potato soup recipes. com and then, space. And I can put in the word potato, And then what Google is going to return to me is all of the documents on my website in order of authority or popularity.

That talk about potatoes or are on the topic of potatoes from top to bottom. I can also do that for the word soup, which is the other entity within my potato soup recipe. So it will show me all the soup recipes and I think you’re getting the point now, right? So this way I can find most relevant, most authoritative, most popular pages on my website that are contextually relevant to the post that I’m building a link to.

And then I can go in there into those pages and build those internal links for myself.

Ashley Segura: And all without needing a tool.

Arsen Rabinovich: Completely free.

Ashley Segura: And it doesn’t take hours. Like, that sounds so simple.

Arsen Rabinovich: It takes time. But it’s the best way of doing this. It’s the most accurate way of doing it.

Ashley Segura: Awesome. Well, thank you so much again for being on another episode. Really appreciate everything that you shared with us.

Arsen Rabinovich: You’re welcome.