Lately, I have just been leaning into clusters more to support those main pages. It’s been helping with topical relevance and overall stability, especially in tougher niches. Have you noticed any difference long term between straight to money page links vs. more cluster driven strategies?
Are you getting better rankings for the supporting pages or money pages by doing this?
It's probably something to do with your internal linking,
Linking directly to the money pages will get them more link juice for sure,
Mixed with internal links to the "supporting pages" will make them rank in most cases,
All depends on the website's overall authority & the pages KWs competition,
Of course, it's not one size fits all, but a rule of thumb that if you want a page to rank, linking directly to it would get it more authority,
You don't need much diversity for the pages you're linking to, you can get most of the link pointing to a few pages without a problem,
Assuming you're built enough percentage already pointing to the homepage, and properly internal linking to all of the other pages,
Then, if that's not enough to rank one of the clusters, you can build some more links when it's needed
