The Value of Internal Links?

[RustyF]

I have seen countless SEO "experts" suggest internal links are great to help the search engines find your content.  I wonder if that is true any more.  It seems like a sitemap would do a better job.

I think tags may even hurt the content I want to Google to know as most important.

I'm using Simple Tags on all of my WP sites. If it "sees" a word in the article that is also a tag it adds a link for that tag to a listing of all the articles with that tag. It only does this once per tag though.

Going on the experts advice, I thought this was a good idea.  But now, I'm thinking these tags reduce the value of links to my eBook or other content i want to feature. Which doesn't get tagged much since I don't promote it all that often on my site within content.  I make it nearly impossible to miss it on the site though.

What I do see the tags doing is helping users find the content. So I do see it improving the bounce rate and giving uses an assist in finding more content about what they are looking for.

I have tags marked as noindex follow. But I'm really considering now removing the links. I hate plugins anyway.  Seems I'm always finding another must have plugin though.

Now I'm thinking I'd be better off to just add links manually into the content that I really want to feature.  All these automatic links I'm generating can't be good.

Thanks for your thoughts on this.

[RobertFisher]

We do a lot of WP sites for clients and I do not like the auto generated internal links plug ins. The problem is they have a tendency to link back in a loop to the page they are linking from and some over do the internal linking. The best bet in my opinion is to know that internal links are good as they can help spread link juice to deeper pages (use them judiciously) and they do help the bots crawl.

So, IMHO, internal links are good but you need to do them by hand in my estimation so that you control them.

Hope this helps