It has been my personal experience – and the experience of many SEO professionals – that a proper internal linking structure compounds the love Google gives a site.
In other words, when you have two sites that are identical in every way, shape, or form (same type & amount of backlinks, both quality content, etc), the one with the best internal link structure will outrank the other one.
This is exactly why I always teach that sniper sites need to have at least 5 or so posts on them. Sure we only care to rank one post (usually the homepage post) but in order to get any credibility whatsoever in Google’s eyes, we need to have at least a few posts that link back to the main post.
I used to always put up one post and would hammer that one post with thousands upon thousands of backlinks… but guess what: it was nearly impossible to rank high in Google with just that one post – even with hundreds of solid backlinks pointing to it.
If anything, Google would penalize my sites because they did not have much worthwhile content on them AND also because having all backlinks point to one single page does look VERY spammy.
This is when I implemented the strategy of having at least a handful of quality posts on each site – with each post linking back to the main post (through a hyperlinked in-content keyword). I also started to randomly build backlinks to each of the posts rather then having all of them pointing to the same one.
My rankings started to improve almost over night. It was pretty cool to say the least!
Let me try & explain it all a little better in this short video I shot for you:
Check out a super cool plugin that helps you automate your in-site link structuring!
Adding those in-site links is a lot of work – especially when you have an established blog that you did not do a lot of in-site linking with right from the beginning.
Which is perhaps why I love the new plugin that Matt came out with that makes this whole process a breeze. More details here…
Even if you don’t get it (though I recommend it), just watch his video on that page and you will pick up a golden nugget or two about the importance of proper internal linking. Enjoy!
Thanks for explaining internal linking so clearly! I am going to the plugin page now.
You have more useful info than the British had cloonies pre-WWII.