Internal Linking Strategies for 2012 and Beyond

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Last Friday, I did a Whiteboard Friday called "Smarter Internal Linking." If you have not yet watched it (I do show some graphs and stuff, so you'll probably need to watch and not just listen), I'd recommend doing so first before reading the rest of this post.

The goal of this post is to clear up a few misconceptions that I saw in the comments, and to show you exactly what I mean about sitewides that could be problematic both now and in the near future for over-optimization algorithms and filters.

One question I saw a few times was about if we should use sitewide footers at all. My answer to this is "absolutely!" Footer links can be awesome for the user experience. Especially in the growing world of mobile surfing of the Internet, there is an increasing need for good navigation at the bottom of websites that allows users to navigate to a place on the site that makes sense, without necessitating scrolling back to the top of the page.

Footer links like SEOmoz's are fine, as they point people to the most important and useful pages on the website. People expect to see them there:

Zappos does this as well, though interestingly they do not have the same footer on the homepage as they do on their category pages (take a look at the homepage and this category to see the difference). They are not overloading you with anchor text and taking you to irrelevant pages from every page, though. Their main footer is large, yes, but contains useful links for the user.

And according to SearchMetrics, their SERP coverage is up and to the right -

Footers like these become an issue when they are scaled out across a full website and also into microsites. This is a common practice for large sites, especially in the travel/hotels/tourism industries.

If this is a normal webpage -

This is an example of a homepage from a major hotels chain -

The architecture looks like this, which is a completely standard architecture -

But if you scale this out to a sitewide section, such as in the hotels site above, then every page becomes like a homepage linking with optimized anchor text. And often these links are irrelevant and don't add value to the user.

Here is an example of interlinking gone crazy -

I recently came across a site that also has many third-party franchise sites. Each of these sites is built off a template (which is not necessarily an issue) and provides local content specific to the area where the franchise is located. Each of the sites, in my opinion, adds value to the user.

Here is an example layout of those sites, with the problem area (in my opinion) highlighted -

When you take this out to scale, the linking between the sites (and all of the links shown in the microsite example are sitewide) begins to look thus:

The best way to steer clear of these over-linking issues that could and probably will get you into trouble, is to categorize your pages. Inside Distilled, we often talk about these categories as "page types", but basically we're talking about the different levels of the pages on your site. Some examples are:

Homepage (a category in and of itself);Category pages;Product pages;Product detail pages;PPC landing pages;Blog posts.

One thought as to how to improve your internal linking, but in an algorithm-update-friendly way, is to interlink between the different levels in ways that make sense. The ultimate best answer would be to create an internal linking schema or algorithm that allows you to link to these pages automatically depending on how you best decide the pages fit.

You'll end up now with linking that looks thus, with all of the pages pointing in being pages in the same geographical category:

As I said in the video, it doesn't make sense to link to all of your important category pages from every other category page, as this is bad from a user perspective. If someone is looking for a Washington DC hotel, they're not interested in seeing London hotels probably. If someone is looking for London hotels, they are probably not interested in Orlando hotels, but they might be interested in Paris or Munich hotels.

Now we need to figure out how to segment. To categorize this specific site, I'd use  the following taxonomy:

Continent;Country;City;State (if US and applicable);Category or hotel

Then, pattern match the continents, then countries, then cities. If we do this, then your London hotels page could like this way, with links in the sidebar to Paris, Munich, Amsterdam, etc and not links to Orlando and Atlanta -

A tip that I gave in the video is to link between your relevant pages on your ccTLDs (.co.uk, .fr, etc) to the relevant page on the other TLDs. Using this methodology, we end up with the following structure and linking patterns instead of the craziness seen above:

As with any blog post you read, you should take the advice with a grain or two of salt. I don't care who writes it, you need to do your own testing and competitor research to find out what is working and then how you can stay competitive while also not putting your website in danger.

I found the principles talked about here by doing a deep dive into how competitors are getting their rankings (this is one factor of many). I found how they are linking and compared that against their traffic to see how it is trending.

You need to do the same. I recommend starting off with your most competitive term and reverse-engineering their strategies, looking specifically at external links, internal links, and content. You might find that you are being beaten because they have superior useful content. Or maybe you'll find that their internal linking is better, and you can learn from their strategies.

Now, depending on the size of your company, you might have a dedicated UX team. If you're working on the scale that I am talking about here, you need to have a UX team, even. Get them to help you categorize your pages and levels, and then work with them to create mockups using a tool like Balsamiq (the tool I used for the illustrations here).

Some people in the comments on the Whiteboard Friday recommended starting to test this by nofollowing your excessive internal linking instead of removing links. I think this is a good place to start, on a small sample of your pages, so that you can test the potential gains or losses experienced through these strategies.

Ultimately though, if these strategies work for you, then you will want to create new page layouts so that your categorization can help you effectively interlink. Slapping a no-follow on these links is only a band-aid, as we are also concerned about conversions and not just rankings.

I hope this helps to clarify some of the points I was making in the video. If you have more questions (and I hope you do now), please leave them in the comments!

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Smarter Internal Linking - Whiteboard Friday

Hey there SEOmoz readers! This week we are talking about what I like to call "Smarter Internal Linking". Rand mentioned internal linking a few months ago before Penguin even hit, back when we were still calling it the "over-optimization penalty". A few months later, we can see the potential effects that Penguin has had and the factors causing them.

So how can we be smarter in our internal linking? How can we target our important pages so that they are able to rank well for competitive terms, yet not be in danger of being slapped by algorithm updates? This is exactly what we are talking about in this video, including a few pro-tips I've picked up doing SEO in the competitive travel industry, especially in regards to microsites and ccTLDs.

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. My name is John Doherty. I'm from Distilled in New York City, out here in Seattle for about a week, for MozCon. I came out here a couple days early, and SEOmoz was happy enough to let me shoot a Whiteboard Friday for you.

This is a topic that I've been thinking about a lot recently. It's the topic of internal linking. Today, in a post-Penguin world, we need to be careful about how we're linking to the other pages on our websites, both internally and externally.

Internal linking is a factor in Penguin, from what we've seen. I've been digging around on a lot of travel sites recently for a client, and I realized that sites that are in competitive niches, such as travel - there are a bunch of others that you can think of that we all may or may not have worked in at some point - that use a lot of internal links, site-wide footers especially, point to here site-wide footers in order to drive targeted anchor text deep into their site.

The problem I've been noticing here is that when you have a set-up like this, this is a beautiful little webpage that I drew for you, with a little URL bar, and I guess this is Chrome because we've got the extensions there, maybe a map here. You've got some text, and you've got your different products through here. It's just going to be an e-commerce site, or it could be a travel site. Here are sidebar links. So this could be your categories, what have you. But then often here, in the footer, there are links that say, "Atlanta Hotels, London Hotels, New York Hotels," and they're on every single page of the website. If you have a site that has 200,000 product pages, you have 200,000 links saying this. One term, two-
word term, key term, pointing back to that page. Something is going to look a little bit suspicious, right?

What I've been seeing here, as I've been going through, doing some competitive analysis, is I look at their search visibility using a tool. I use a tool called Search Metrics Essentials. I look, and a lot of them, their traffic is going up. It's ticking up.

Get to the Venice update, which happened back end of March or the beginning of April, which basically prioritized local content. This especially affected the travel industry, so category pages weren't ranking quite as well. They were bumping up the most well-linked-to individual hotel pages, what have you. Traffic dropped for most of them. Almost every single travel site I've seen, traffic dropped. It happens. Google made an algorithm change.

Then they take tick along, and we get to the next algorithm update, Penguin. Every single site that I've seen that has site-wide links like this, boom, dropped. Most of them have recovered a little bit. They've started ticking back up, but almost every single one has dropped. The sites that didn't, that are not linked this way, might have seen a little bit of a dip, but by and large they were good.

So what's going on here? The only thing I can think of, when it comes to internal linking, that I can see on these sites was these site-wide footers. They're also doing this externally. A lot of these brands, especially, have microsites, individual hotel sites that are linking back using the exact same footer as is on the main website. Same terms on every single page on those sites. Multiply this by four thousand, five thousand, ten thousand, once again, you have thousands upon thousands of links saying these terms. This is a problem.

Today I want to talk about smarter internal linking. How can we link to our important pages in a smarter way? I have a few points for you. How can we be smarter? This is the question we should ask ourselves. How can we be smarter about our internal linking?

Question number one: Go back to the user. What would the user expect to see? Google wants to reward a good user experience. They want people to be able to find what they want to find as quickly as possible. So I always start with the user. What is a person going to expect to see? Then, from an SEO perspective, I think, "Which pages are the most competitive?" You go and you do your keyword research, maybe use SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty tool. You look at the SERPs. You figure out which sites are ranking. You look at all the links that they have. Which ones are going to be the hardest to rank for? Especially if you're working in-house, you probably know what this. You probably think off the top of your head, "Oh yeah, I know this keyword." This one is going to take a lot more, not only external links, but also internal.

So which pages are the most competitive? You need to prioritize those, but not the way that I just showed you. The third point is think about your taxonomy. Think about the page types on your site. I've drawn out here a little site architecture for you, right? We start with our home page, and then this is another page type of ours, the category. Then we have the product, and then we have the product details. If we're keeping with the hotels example, it's going to be your home page, domain.com. Your category, domain.com/londonhotels, or language/londonhotels, what have you. Product, so this is going to be a hotel page. Product detail, this could be like amenities for the hotel or something like that. It's a subpage of your product page.

Obviously, these are going to be your most important pages. They're higher in your site architecture. They're going to be more useful to the users. These are going to be the ones Google wants to serve up for the competitive search terms. We link to as many of those as we can off the home page. If you have a thousand of them, how are you going to be able to do that? If you have hotels in every single city in the United States, there's no way you can link to all of them from your home page, nor would you want to. You're diluting your link equity basically irreparably.

Here's another category page. This guy's sad. He's like, "What's going on?
I'm getting no love at all." Then he's got product pages underneath there, who are also getting no love. I'm not going to link. First of all, this isn't going to be my most competitive term. This is probably going to be like second-tier competitiveness. I'm not going to link to this guy.

Let's say this is London, this is Atlanta, this is New York, this is Boston. I live in New York, and there's a New York-Boston feud going on, so we'll make Boston second-class. If you're from Boston, I apologize. I love you guys. But I don't want to link to the Boston page, necessarily, from the individual London product page. But it will make sense for me to link to Boston from New York, from Philadelphia, etc. It's the same thing. If this is Atlanta, and this is New York, I don't necessarily want to link to it. London and New York, I don't necessarily want to link to an individual New York hotel page, but I may want to link to the New York hotel page from Boston and vice versa. We're joining these two up. Or if I know I need to prioritize Boston a little bit, I'm just going to link to it from New York, because that has more link equity going to it, because it's more of a direct line from the home page.

Be thinking about some creative ways that you can do this, some creative ways that you can link between your different page types and your important pages.

Some that I've seen, that are working, especially in the travel industry right now, are sidebars. Once again, these are not site-wides. Most of them are doing it in the form of popular products, popular locations, trending locations, something like that. A lot of them I think that they update them semi-frequently. If I was doing it, I would update them semi-frequently. Keep the main ones. Keep London and Boston, etc. Keep your very competitive ones. But then you can switch them as other keywords become competitive. If you know people are going to New York for Christmas, you can switch that out, and you can prioritize that page for a while to get that ranking right before the Christmas holiday hits.

Here's a little pro tip for you, something that I've seen working. This isn't necessarily internal linking. It's like quasi-internal linking. Think about your ccTLDs. If your company is in the U.S. or in the U.K., in France, etc., think about how you can use the ccTLDs to link back to these pages from the relevant page on that ccTLD. So you've got domain.co.uk/londonhotels with UK English. Domain.com/londonhotels with U.S. English, think about how you can link from this page, from this London hotels page, back to this page. You're still driving the targeted links. You could do it through an image. I've seen some sites doing it with all of the countries down in the footer. On that UK page, if you mouse over the US, it says "London Hotels," pointing back. Super-smart way to do it. They don't do that site-wide, and so they're able to drive those targeted links back from a different domain. Those are going to be very valuable for them.

One last thing that I've mentioned briefly at the beginning here was beware of your microsites. Beware of your microsite site-wide links. If you have sitewides on your microsites, as well as on your main site, this is exactly the kind of thing that Google can easily figure out. They can see everything. They can see the code. They can see the way that it's structured. They can look at the Who Is information. Of course, we can do things to try to finagle and try to trick Google, but those are only going to last for the short term. So think about building for the long term. Microsite site-wides are not really working anymore, from what I've seen, so beware of these. Think about the taxonomies within these as well. You can still link. Think about these the same as you would think about your ccTLDs, linking to the relevant pages back on your main website.

Now I want to get a little bit bluebird for you. I want to think a little bit big. If I were Google, what would I do if I were Google? If you were Google, what would you be wanting to see? How would you want people to structure their sites? How would you want people to link? What kind of content would you want on there? How should people link between all of that? Google wants the best user experience. If I'm trying to serve the best user experience, I'm not necessarily going to have a travel guide on another page. If I have a London hotels page, why I'm not going to have a travel guide that I'm sending people all around? It's bad from a user experience. It's bad from a conversion experience, etc. I'm going want all of that right there.

If I were Google, I'd be looking to rank sites that are like a London hotels page that also has a travel guide on there. I saw one site doing this recently. I was like, "Light bulb brilliant." Put your travel guide there on the page. You get links saying London hotels travel guide, London hotels, hotel travel guide. You can also link to the travel guide internally so you're not just using London hotels to link to it. That's the kind of thing that I would want to be rewarding, if I were Google.

In summary, I hope this Whiteboard Friday has been helpful to you. I hope I've given you some things to think about when it comes to internal linking. Feel free to tweet at me, dohertyjf on Twitter. Email me, my email is on the Distilled website. Once again, I'm John Doherty from Distilled New York City. It's been a pleasure. Please leave your questions and comments down below. Thanks.

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