Questions
-
Relaunching a site that has had thousands of posts linking to the same 20 articles. How to properly setup internal linking?
Hi Leggo, thanks for the question! Your current setup is definitely not optimal for SEO, as you are discovering. There are a few things that you can do to help yourself out here. First, there are three good resources here on Moz that you should check out (the last 2 done by me in 2012, but still very relevant): https://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link https://moz.com/blog/internal-linking-strategies-for-2012-and-beyond https://moz.com/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday On to your specific questions. You ask how to set up your internal linking. Your current setup of linking to just 20 pages internally is definitely not helping you out because you are effectively just telling Google about those 20 articles and not the longtail of articles that you have. XML sitemaps are for discovery purposes for Google, not ranking. An HTML sitemap is a must for you if you have a lot of content and can also help with discoverability and a bit with rankings as well, but it's definitely not all you need to do. If your content is structured well (in categories that make sense, tagged, etc), then you can set up a system (all depends on your CMS how this is configured) that links similar articles with other similar articles. Some sites have done smart things with linking to specific articles that have more potential search volume, and deprioritizing the number of internal links to articles that don't have much potential. In the latter case, eventually you should audit if you should remove those lower volume or quality pages to help your site overall. You say that it is indeed the case that you have these pages. I would at first not put them in the sitemap. Then, decide if you want to a) update them to make them quality or b) remove them. That's an internal decision based off of current available resources (time, people) and opportunity. I've done both in the past (updated or removed) and both can definitely help. It just depends on your overall strategy for your site! Good luck!
Link Building | | dohertyjf0