Internal content linking practices have remained the same for the past twenty years, which is strange because Google has undergone dramatic changes in the past ten years and even more so in the past five. It may be time to consider updating your internal linking strategies to more closely align with how Google understands and ranks web pages.
Internal Linking Standard Practices
I want to make it clear that I am not saying that this is the way to do internal linking and that everyone is wrong. What I’m doing is pointing out a disconnect in how internal linking is done and how Google understands content and keeping an open mind about how you do internal linking with that knowledge in mind.
Raise your hand if that’s you:
An SEO is writing or updating content and finds a keyword phrase that matches the keywords targeted on an internal page, so those words become anchor text.
OK, you can put your hand down. 🙂
I hope there will be a lot of hands raised and that’s okay because that’s how everyone does it.
As an example, I visited a website called “white hat” that offers a service related to SEO and in an article on a subtopic of “internal linking” they link to another page on What is internal linking using the text of anchorage “internal link”.
The landing page exactly matches the two-word phrase that the second page targets. Standard practice is that if you find a keyword match for another internal page, you turn it into anchor text on the landing page, right?
But it’s not right.
The sentence containing this anchor text and the paragraph containing it discuss the importance of internal links in getting internal pages indexed and ranked. The landing page is an explanation about is a general page about what internal linking is.
If you think like an SEO, there is nothing wrong with this link because the anchor text matches the target keyword on the second page.
But if you think like a site visitor who is reading the first page, what is the chance that the reader will stop reading and click the link to find out what the internal link is?
Zero percent of readers are very likely to click on the link because the link is not relevant to the context.
What does a machine think?
To see what a machine thought about this sentence, I copied it and asked ChatGPT:
ChatGPT replied:
“The sentence highlights the critical role of internal linking in SEO strategies.”
I then asked ChatGPT to summarize the paragraph in fifteen words or less and he replied:
“Internal linking is crucial to website indexing and ranking, and the context of the link is especially important.”
The context of both the sentence and the paragraph is the importance of internal linking but not What is internal linking.
The irony of the above example is that I took it from a web page that discussed the topic of the importance of context for internal links, which shows how deeply ingrained the idea is that the only context necessary for a link is internal is the anchor text.
But that’s not how Google understands context.
The bottom line is that for an internal link to be contextual, it is important to consider the meaning of the sentence and paragraph in which it exists.
What internal linking is not
There are decades-old precepts about internal linking that are commonly accepted as canonical without sufficient critical examination.
Here are a few examples:
Place your internal links closer to the top of the web page. Internal links are used to help other pages rank well. Internal links are to help index other pages. Use keyword-rich anchor text, but make them look natural. Internal linking is important to Google. Add internal links to your most important webpage on a topic from all subtopic pages.
What’s missing from the previously commonly accepted ideas about internal linking is that none of it has anything to do with site visitors reading the content.
These ideas aren’t even connected to the way Google analyzes and understands web pages, and as a result aren’t really what internal linking should be about. Therefore, before identifying a modern way of linking internally that is in line with the modern search engine, it is useful to understand how Google understands web pages.
Taxonomy of topics in the content of the web page
A taxonomy is a way of classifying something and every well-organized web page can be subdivided into a general topic and the sub-topics below that, one flows into the other so that the general topic describes what they are about all subtopics as a group and also each subtopic. describes one aspect of the main topic in what can be called a topic taxonomy, the hidden structure within the content.
A web page is called unstructured data. But in order to make sense of it, Google has to impose some structure on it. Thus, a web page is divided into sections such as header, navigation, main content, sidebar and footer.
Google’s Martin Splitt went further and said that the main content is analyzed for the Central Table Annotation, a description of what the topic is about, explaining:
“We’re just looking at the content and … we have something called the Core Annotation, for example, and there are some other annotations that we have where we look at the semantic content as well as potentially the design tree.
But fundamentally, we can already read it from the content structure in HTML and figure out, “Oh! This looks like from all the natural language processing we’ve done on all the text content here that we’ve obtained, it seems to be mostly about subject A, dog food.”
The core annotation is Google’s estimate of what the content is about and identifies it by reading it from the content structure.
It is that content structure that can be called Topic Taxonomy, where a content page is planned and created according to a topic and subtopics.
Structure of semantic content and internal links
Content has a hidden semantic structure that can be called a topic taxonomy.
A well-constructed web page has a general structure that generally resembles the following:
Introductory paragraph that introduces the main topic -Subtopic 1 (a block of content) -Subtopic 2 (a block of content) -Subtopic 3 (a block of content) Final paragraph that closes everything
Subtopics also have their own hierarchy, like this:
Subtopic 1 – Paragraph A – Paragraph B – Paragraph C
And each paragraph also has its own hierarchy like this:
Paragraph A -Sentence 1 -Sentence 2 -Sentence 3 -Sentence 4
The diagram above is an example of how unstructured data like a web page has a hidden structure that can help a machine understand it better by tagging it with a central annotation, for example.
Given that Google sees content as a series of topics and subtopics that are organized into a “content structure” with headings (H1, H2) delimiting each block of content, it doesn’t make sense to also consider internal links from the same way?
For example, my links to the Topic Taxonomy article and Martin Splitt’s quote source are contextually relevant, and many readers of this article are likely to follow those links because they extend the content in an interesting way, are … contextually relevant. .
And being contextually relevant, in my opinion, Google is likely to find the topic of the linked pages to be relevant as well.
I also didn’t link them to track or rank them. I linked them because they are useful to readers and expand on the surrounding content in which these links are embedded.
Semantic relevance and contextual internal links
For over ten years I’ve been encouraging the SEO industry to drop their keywords and start thinking in terms of topics and it’s great to finally see more of the industry catch on and start thinking about content in terms of what it means. at the semantic level.
Now take the next step and let go of that “keyword driven” mindset and apply that understanding to internal linking. Doing so makes sense for SEO as well as readers. In my 25 years of hands-on SEO experience, I can confidently say that the most future-proof SEO strategy is one that thinks about the impact to site visitors because Google looks at pages that way too.
Featured image by Shutterstock/Iconic Bestiary
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