Interlinking: A Guide to Improve Your Website's SEO

Interlinking or internal linking is a technique that improves the SEO positioning of our websites. For this reason, you should optimize the internal links of your site.

It is, along with link building, one of the main factors for SEO positioning.

In this article, you will learn everything about internal linking or interlinking, so it doesn't sound like Chinese to you (or at least that's what we will try).

Let's get started!

What is Interlinking?

Internal links are those that point from one page to another within your website. In contrast, Link building is the construction of external links that point from one website to another domain. That is, links from other pages that point to your website.

Now that this point is clear, let's continue!:

Interlinking or internal linking is the connection between the links of the pages of a website, with the aim of providing information of interest to the user.

The idea is to link two pages of the same domain, through a link.

This is done through an anchor text, also known as anchor text, which is the word or words that, when clicked, direct you to the new page.

Imagine you are searching for "how to make seafood soup" and you enter a website that you find interesting. While reading the preparation of the soup, it tells you that a good "sofrito" is essential. Notice the word (anchor text) "sofrito," if you click on it, it takes you to another page of the same website, where it explains how to make a good "sofrito."

By providing this information of interest, you achieve, on one hand, that the user navigates on the website for a longer time, which is an SEO positioning factor. And on the other hand, you make it easier for search engines like Google to better understand the theme and the hierarchy of the pages, facilitating their crawling and indexing.

A little clearer?

Now let's look at all the advantages that internal linking brings to the SEO of your project.

Benefits of Interlinking for SEO

Search engines find it easier to navigate websites that have internal links. Therefore, you should work on Interlinking, and you will improve your SEO positioning.

In addition to obtaining these benefits:

Internal links transmit authority:

A good Interlinking strategy transmits authority between the pages of a website.

The page authority is a value or measure that identifies the reliability and quality of a page on a website. This value is determined based on the quality and quantity of internal links.

Different from the domain authority which represents the popularity and relevance of the entire website. And the value is determined based on the quantity and quality of the backlinks (external links) that the third-party website has.

In this case, the PageRank is responsible for measuring the authority (or popularity) of a web page.

Not only do the backlinks (links) that point to a page increase its value (authority) in the eyes of Google, but internal links do as well, as they send signals of trust and relevance to Google. Don't worry, we will see this in the next point about indexing.

Link Juice?

Pages with higher authority like the Home (homepage) can transfer part of their value (authority) to other pages through internal links, this SEO concept is called Link Juice.

So... is PageRank the same as Link Juice?

Let’s not get confused! PageRank is a metric that measures the strength (authority) of a page and Link Juice is the strength that is transmitted (through internal linking) between the pages of the same site.

By distributing the authority of the website among its different pages, the SEO positioning of the site is strengthened.

Dumping Factor?

Here’s a more technical term! Don’t worry, we will only mention it so you recognize it.

We said that PageRank (PR) is a metric that measures the authority of a website, well, the dumping factor is the estimated probability (0.15%) that a person while browsing will leave and go to another URL.

In more technical SEO terms, the dumping factor is based on the internal strength (Link Juice) that each URL has within the structure of a website.

When Google's bot arrives at a URL, it will be 15% less strong than the originating URL. That’s why we say that a URL has a default PageRank of 0.15 loss of link juice.

PageRank Sculpting?

PageRank sculpting is an SEO optimization technique that influences the distribution of Link Juice, so that the most important pages receive a greater number of internal links.

Basically, the higher the authority of a page, the greater the probability that Google will understand it as relevant and, therefore, rank it higher in search results.

Before ranking, it must be indexed:

Interlinking favors indexing:

Following the previous point, for example, if you link from the Home to a specific page, you are sending signals to Google that this content is valuable to the user. Therefore, it favors the crawling of your site and reduces the indexing time.

To understand this point, let me quickly explain how Google Search works:

Crawling: Google downloads content (text, images, and videos) from pages it finds on the Internet using automated programs called "crawlers."

Indexing: Google analyzes the content of the pages and stores the information in Google's index, a large database.

Publication of search results: when a user performs a search, Google returns relevant information about that query.

Basically, when a page has many internal links pointing to it, it is considered more important and, therefore, more likely to be indexed and ranked by search engines. Thus, we can say that interlinking helps Google index your content.

Improves user experience:

An internal link serves to indicate to the user that there is another related page that may be of interest.

In this way, we respond to the needs of the visitor and improve their navigation and, therefore, the user experience. 

The simpler and more intuitive the navigation, the better, as it will be more likely that users will stay on our site longer and find what they are looking for.

This benefits SEO positioning.

Helps search engines and users understand the content:

Internal links help search engines understand the structure of your website. Keep in mind that good architecture will be the basis of internal linking. 

To build good architecture, you must conduct a keyword research focused on your business, thinking about your target audience and their interests. In which the URLs are located a few levels deep (page depth), so that crawling is faster.

For example: Home/Category/Product

And... what is this about depth levels or page Depth?

We use this term to refer to the number of clicks that a user must make to access a blog article or a product (if it is an e-commerce), taking the homepage as the starting point.

The ideal is that it is no more than 3 clicks (having important pages of your website more than 3 clicks away from your homepage is bad for SEO and for your visitors).

The idea is to make it easy for the user. As you can understand, if a user enters a website and sees a lot of information without meaning or hierarchy, they will leave. And as for Google, it won't understand very well what you offer.

However, if the user enters a website and it is easy to navigate, they will stay shopping or reading the contents of your blog, and Google will understand and better value your website.

Google has stated that URLs that are difficult to find will be given less relevance.

Therefore, we need to place the most important URLs as close to the Home as possible.

Types of Interlinking

There are several types of internal linking and web architecture:

Horizontal Linking

This horizontal structure would be like this: 

Home/ Blog Posts

URL: https://www.web.com/interlinking

If you offer quality content on a specific topic, this could be your correct type of interlinking.

The ideal is to link from the easiest pages to rank to the more complicated ones. This way, these difficult-to-rank pages will receive more internal links (link juice).

Vertical Linking or SILO Structure

In the vertical structure, the homepage must link to the most relevant pages or categories of the site. And these, in turn, to the lower-level pages.

For example, from the main categories to the subcategories and from these to the products or posts.

Like this: 

Home/ Category/Subcategory/ Product/

URL: https://web.com/women-sneakers/adidas-running

How to create good internal linking for SEO?

The first thing we are going to explain is the types of internal links that exist:

Types of Internal Links

There are follow links where authority is transmitted, as you are telling Google in a way that you recommend the content on that URL.

No follow links where authority is not transmitted. We will leave it there, as there are SEOs who claim that it is not so, and this would lead to a broad debate.

And the UGC (User Generated Content) links, as the name indicates, are generated by users, for example in comments and open discussions in forums.

In truth, all internal links should be follow (followed by Google's spider) or UGC. Since no follow links do not transmit authority.

Obfuscate links?

SEOs believe that the link juice (…this would lead to another debate) that reaches a URL is distributed among all links and the nofollow ones too. So according to them, this means that nofollow links cause a loss of link juice.

To prevent the internal strength from being "diluted," one solution would be to obfuscate the links to retain all authority. This is useful, for example, for footer links like legal notices, privacy...

Oh, I just dropped another term!: Obfuscating a link means making Google unaware that a link is a link, that is, hiding it. For the user, it will be a normal link, where if you click it, it will take you to another page, but Google will not detect it.

You can do this using Javascript, but this is more technical, so the easiest way is to use a plugin for WordPress. We recommend: Link Juice Optimizer by Fede Gómez.

The plugin allows you to obfuscate links in 3 parts of your website: Menu items, links within the content, and pages and links within the content of HTML widgets.

Contextual Links

These are internal links that are surrounded by text, thus passing more strength and semantic value than other types of links like navigation links, for example.

They tend to be more natural and can be included when writing articles on the blog. And invite the user to read valuable information.

For example: if in a paragraph we talk about "how to make seafood soup," and we link to a related URL like "ideal sofrito for seafood soup," it will send stronger signals to Google than that same link if it were in a navigation block (which is not surrounded by text).

Exact Anchor in Contextual Links

Internal links that are within the content must be follow and have exact anchor text. Although it is advisable to use variations of words to give naturalness to the linking.

Do you remember the definition of "anchor text"? the word or text in which the link is embedded.

As we have seen, these links provide greater semantics than navigational links. Since they are nourished by the paragraph and text in which they are embedded.

The same goes for the strength of the link; if Google detects that this link comes from content of the same theme, it will take it into account more.

Navigation Menu – NAV

It is the main navigation menu that we find on a webpage. Naturally, the URLs (usually categories) in the NAV menu receive authority transfer.

The idea is to try to transmit the maximum Page Rank to the most important URLs of our site. That’s why you should include the most important categories or pages in the NAV.

Image Interlinking

Internal links within images are those that you can include in them, with the anchor text of the image's alt attribute. They are considered to transfer less authority than contextual internal links (content links).

Bread Crumbs

They are a navigation block that indicates the architecture of the web. That is, the category or pillar page to which it belongs.

They are ideal for the user and Google to better understand the architecture of your website. You can also use breadcrumbs to send links to higher-level pages.

Aspects to consider:

– Ascending Linking: If internal links are configured in the CMS, an automatic internal linking is generated. They always link to their upper pages, so it is often said that this internal linking is ascending. 

– In very large websites, it is good practice to activate breadcrumbs, as they facilitate user navigation and transmit authority (link juice) to higher categories.

Paginators

Pagination is the numbering of the pages of a website. This type of internal linking divides a category into various pages. They are common in e-commerce.

They tend to generate high depth levels.

If, for example, we have a category with 100 products and listings are generated 5 at a time, we will have a total of 20 paginations.

In this case, a prefooter can be used to reduce depth levels.

Facets or Faceted Navigation

Facets are product listing pages that allow the user to search easily. They are the filters we can find, for example, in online stores.

Be careful! These internal links are a double-edged sword.

Although they help in user experience, they can also create thousands of URLs without value, which will cause you to run out of crawl budget for your important pages or categories.

Therefore, they can negatively affect SEO.

How can we avoid this? The solution is to obfuscate the links so that Google does not index them.

Media Markt is an example, as it obfuscates the filtering link to avoid losing authority.

What is Crawl Budget?

Crawl Budget or "crawling budget" is the amount of time Google allocates to a website to handle the crawling of its URLs.

Footer

The footer contains links for legal notices, cookies, privacy, social networks.

The links must be obfuscated so that Google does not see them (index them). To avoid losing authority there (some put the footer links as nofollow, and that is a mistake).

Just like in the menu, all links added to the footer will be repeated on each of the pages.

We can also find another internal linking element that is created just before the footer and is called pre-footer. The goal of this module is to create it only on some higher authority pages, to distribute it to other pages that have less.

Sidebar

It is the sidebar that appears on some web pages. Internal links can be introduced here with information that complements the main content.

Not everything is SEO. There will be times when, due to usability (UX) or CRO reasons, you won't be able to link pages in the navigation menu, so you can use linking modules, like Sidebar or Footer.

Common Mistakes in Interlinking

Some of the most common interlinking mistakes are:

Not keeping track of links

Not controlling the interlinking of our website can lead to a loss of traffic for our project. The ideal is to keep track in a spreadsheet, of the source page, destination, and anchor text.

Infinite Scroll

Web projects with a lot of content (like e-commerce, resource blogs) face problems when structuring and displaying so much information.

As we saw earlier, one way is pagination, facets, or the famous infinite scroll.

Which is the loading and displaying of content as a user scrolls down the screen.

Another point! with infinite scroll, it is a "mess" technically, as Google is unable to interact with it and it may be that some of the content goes unnoticed.

Moreover, resource consumption is much higher.

How can we solve this problem? Implement infinite scroll using JavaScript and HTML. This way, Google will be able to understand it.

Orphan Pages

Avoid orphan pages, which are those that do not receive any internal links.

They will be difficult for Google to see and will not receive any authority.

How to solve this problem? By linking all the pages of your site to each other coherently, based on what we have explained throughout this guide.

Having broken links on the website

Having broken links (error 404) is one of the biggest mistakes you can make in your interlinking strategy, as it will lead to wasting link juice, losing authority, and traffic.

Check the links with SEO tools that allow you to detect them and solve the problem.

How to know the internal links of a website?

Through the different SEO tools available, you can see the internal links of your website. We will use Search Console, as it is free and more basic.

Knowing internal links by URL with Search Console

You will need to access your Google Search Console account and click on the "links" option.

Once you are here, go to the "internal links" section and follow to "More information." A list of the most internally linked URLs of your website will appear.

And if you click on each of them, Search Console will indicate from which URLs they have been linked.

Interlinking Plugin

There are some more plugins for internal linking, but Link Whisper is one of the best. This AI-powered tool helps you with your Interlinking SEO strategy.

Link Whisper, based on the keywords of your content, suggests relevant internal links when you start writing your article directly in WordPress. 

It also has an "Auto-Linking" feature that allows you to automatically build internal links.

You can try it in its free version and see how building internal links for your website to rank on Google is much easier. 

Conclusions

If you have made it this far, the concept should be clear:

Interlinking or internal linking is the network of links between different URLs of the same website.

It is essential for improving a website's indexing, enhancing user experience, distributing page authority, and helping search engines discover and understand the website's content.

Do you have any questions?

I do too: When will Matías Prats finally retire? Just a joke. lol

See you in the comments.