Busby SEO Test – Does Internal Linking Pattern Still Do The Trick?
January 19, 2009, filed under Blogging Insights
In other words, do your sitewide links pointing to your favourite post still provide a significant boost to its ranking? Or on the contrary, they will cause your featured post to be penalized by Google?
Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz did some testing around internal links and anchor text and found some interesting results.
- Internal Anchor Text Has Very Little Impact on the Homepage
- Excessive Internal Anchor Text Linking / Manipulation Can Trip An Automated Penalty on Google
- Beyond a Certain Point, Adding More Internal Links to a Page Does Not Necessarily Flow More Anchor Text Value
In my early effort to compete in Busby SEO Test, I placed links to my competing page almost everywhere on my site and feed. Whether it triggers or not bad reactions from Google, I decided to reduce the amount of patternal internal linking to my Busby SEO Test page.
Rand’s experiment suggest that previously penalized page is restored its position and indexing right away after the excessive links are removed. However, there is also an assumption that immediate change to your internal linking structure can cause another penalty. These two poles apart theory of how Google works makes either if I keep the links or not both risky alternatives.
So why did I choose to strip the links?
I believe that Google is getting more human in determining which links are natural and staying away from patterns time to time. Therefore I tried to emerge links to the articles I want to promote the most natural way. One of the methods I’m using is by writing related articles and using the related articles plugin. The related articles list is a dynamic list which content changes everytime new articles are submitted.
Other way, if I choose to display links to the Busby SEO Test page to increase awareness, I’d add the nofollow attribute to make it bot friendly 
.
How about links on your navbar or sidebar? I’ll say leave them as they were. I do. However I try not to add more sitewide internal links in the future.
I’d love to know your experience in your own sitewide internal linking. Do they bring satisfying results? And if you made any changes to your linking structure, hows the result?
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Very tricky. I believe the use of anchor text should be very natural without a lot of thinking to try and enhance your ranking.I agree with you there, use links in articles that are relevant and place two or three links to the page with a more specific anchor text(long tail keyword preferably).
Great post.
I was ranking 3rd well for a competitive term and I got greedy. I wanted to rank 1st and sent a few thousand links using sitewide, and boom my page went deeep into the 20’s..
Amateur SEO´s last blog post..Link Exchange Techniques
Very interesting dilemma. I think the natural links are safest, if not best. Links in one post should encourage visitors to read further around a related topic or to obtain more details.
SBA´s last blog post..Content Is Not King
Hey I find this interesting. I just added a “related post” plugin to my site and 4 days later my rankings for keywords that I was on page 2 and 3 for dropped to pages 33 to 40.
Do you think I should deactivate the plug in?
There are a lot of factors taken account when determining SERPs and in my opinion, the plugin should affect the articles listed in “related articles” section more instead of the main article itself.
So I would suggest optimizing the main article to get it back to its previous position or to the first page.