[Guide] Making the most of internal link building

fasttrak

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Internal link building is hugely important to ranking your money site, it is also really easy to get wrong. Something which I never see mentioned on BHW is the First Link Priority Rule, which is criminal.

If you do not know what it is, you are missing a trick and wasting your hard earned internal link juice.

So with that in mind, let me explain what it is and how you should be managing your internal link strategy.

Don't worry, it is really easy and can take you just a few minutes to fix your money site, and maybe even push pages stuck on page 2 to page 1.

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If you missed any of my previous guides, you can follow the links below to catch up.

Smart Internal Link Building - First Link Priority Rule

The basic premise of the First Link Priority Rule is that when a page links more than once to the same target url, Google will ignore all the other links after the first one.

So how does this effect your money site? How are you losing your valuable link juice?

Imagine you have 2 links on the same internal page, both pointing to your money page, which anchor text does Google prioritise?

According to this rule, it is simple, the 1st one.

How does this work in practice?

Do you have navigation bar on your site? Yeah, me too. Does it look like this one?

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Yeah, I know, I am back to baseball bats again, I told you before, I am lazy.

Anyway, why could this be a problem?

Well perhaps you have written a great supporting article to link to your Wood Baseball Bats money page. Maybe it looks something like this.

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Nice content, nice keyword rich link to your money site.

Unfortunately, Google sees this.


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So Google ignores the "wood baseball bats" link in the copy, which is the actual KW you are trying to rank, and uses "Bats". After all, who in their right mind is trying to rank Bats or even Baseball Bats. That is not low hanging fruit, which is where I prefer to play and bank.

Lesson

A navigation bar is not just there to make your site look REAL. If you put a link on it, Google will prioritise it as it comes 1st on your page, and your hard worked content and keyword rich anchor was for nothing....

So either use keyword rich anchors that you are targeting to rank in the navigation bar, or remove it completely.

Bonus Tip - Remember to consider KW anchor density when you are planning your site structure. You do not want to destroy your anchor text ratio and your money page, which is why many of us have navigation bars with Nofollow links only.

Bonus Tip 2 - Remember that Google has recently implemented an algorithm change (March 1st), and now takes your Nofollow commands as a 'suggestion' only. :mad:

Conclusion

Simple onsite SEO changes like this one can make all the difference from you having lots of dead bodies on page 2 or lots of money pages ranking on page 1.

Hopefully this helps some of you move up the serps, and best of all, it is pretty easy to implement.


Let me know what you think and if this is something you want more of? If so, I will get to work on some more.

:):):)

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Thanks bro for the share i saw it
so make is simple an example like, let say Covi19 this keyword in this content A

another content is about covi19

so I put this content talk about covi19 into the key word covi19 in content A
right?

what u mean
 
So now wouldn't it be better to try to rank for internal pages for which you don't have a link on the navbar?
Thanks for info.
 
This is the first time I read about this (overlapping links). It's pretty interesting actually, great stuff as usual @fasttrak.
 
ive noticed that when building strong links to my money page, all the rankings of my inner pages will increase in serps too...so interlinking is really important
 
My navigation links usually point to category pages and not direct article pages.
 

:D

Thanks bro for the share i saw it
so make is simple an example like, let say Covi19 this keyword in this content A

another content is about covi19

so I put this content talk about covi19 into the key word covi19 in content A
right?

what u mean

If you have 2 links anywhere on a page linking to another page, Google will use the 1st link to pass juice and devalue the second. It does not matter where the links are, but wasting navigation links/juice is a VERY common mistake.

Yeah but there is a catch:

Are "Bats" linking to "/bats" or "https://domain.com/bats" ???

Doesnt it make a difference?

Article says they are both linking to the same page and premise of this rule is that they are linking to the same page. Obviously if they are linking to different pages this rule does not come in to effect.

So now wouldn't it be better to try to rank for internal pages for which you don't have a link on the navbar?
Thanks for info.

I treat my nav bars as 'aesthetic' only, and rank my inner pages separately. As we are talking about internal linking here, I make sure that any links I build to a money page take the full power of that page. So in other words, my nav bars (if I use them) do not link to the money pages I am ranking, only CONTENT HTML links do.

This is the first time I read about this (overlapping links). It's pretty interesting actually, great stuff as usual @fasttrak.

Don't you think Google is smart enough to different menu cross site links from links on page body?
How do you know google ignores links except the first link? It makes no sense to do so.

It makes absolute sense to do so. This is not new and was introduced because of link stuffing on high PR pages over 10 years ago. As far as we are aware, Google still follows this rule.

https://moz.com/blog/20-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links

Matt Cutts talks about this back in 2014, referring to the last time he checked in 2009.

Previous studies certainly proved this to be true, I have not seen any newer studies, nor has Moz, but it is safer to assume that this is still the case today, to a degree. If you are trying to eke out that last bit of juice to push a money page in to the top 10 or up a spot, this is a good bet and will help.

I am not sure if this is true. This would mean that sites with a menu would not see any benefit from internal linking...

Please see above. They will see some benefit from the juice passed, but not as much as they could do, depending on anchor text used.

If the linking is done wrong, it would certainly dilute the benefit of their internal linking. Which is why you need to put some thought in to site structure.

Woah great research done

Thanks. This may not be as important as getting an offsite powerful link, but getting our onsite SEO right is free and does help our rankings.

Since its you ;) you could mitigate this issue by using any of the following
  1. hash in the URL
  2. querystring + canonical link on the target page
  3. 301 redirect
Please note: I have not tried any of these for some years, so maybe do a simple study first before employing these methods on a money site.

However saying that. I was reading a cool case study on BHW last month where a member used Bitly to juice up his nav bar links and used normal linking in his body content. Smart.

I forget who it was, sorry to whoever you are, and thank you for the study and idea.

Please note: Again, I have not tried this personally, but it is interesting and might be worth looking at.

ive noticed that when building strong links to my money page, all the rankings of my inner pages will increase in serps too...so interlinking is really important

And free as well. No brainer.

My navigation links usually point to category pages and not direct article pages.

I do that for one of my sites, but I do not use category pages on any of the others as I do not index them. Works well on the one I do index though.

:)
 
Great share.

I have a medium size e-commerce website and I decided to link to some of my products in the main navigation. I believe this is good for UX purposes but I am using keyword rich anchor as well.

However, Im still linking internally to this products from blog posts and so on...


should I stop linking internally to these products?
 
Great share.

I have a medium size e-commerce website and I decided to link to some of my products in the main navigation. I believe this is good for UX purposes but I am using keyword rich anchor as well.

However, Im still linking internally to this products from blog posts and so on...


should I stop linking internally to these products?

No, that sounds like the perfect setup. Just be careful that you do not destroy your KW anchor density, maybe vary the anchor text in the content if you use exact match in the nav bar.

Make sense?
 
No, that sounds like the perfect setup. Just be careful that you do not destroy your KW anchor density, maybe vary the anchor text in the content if you use exact match in the nav bar.

Make sense?
Makes perfect sense bro, I will try using partial matches in content
 
So basically, which would be the best option? Adding a basic page like home page, about page, or contact us page on navigation or would it be best to put categories page on nav bar???
 
So basically, which would be the best option? Adding a basic page like home page, about page, or contact us page on navigation or would it be best to put categories page on nav bar???

Very much depends on your specific site. Have a look at some of my earlier replies to members for additional information. Saves me repeating myself ;)

As always. It's a great share. Thank you. Will apply it to my sites.

You're welcome and I hope it helps nudge you up the rankings a bit.
 
Will it work if I do add a menu but I Nofollow its items?
 
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