Automatic Internal Linking

8 years ago

Originally Posted by Craigcmatthew

I have a blog with about 100 articles and it was getting really difficult to manually interlink them all. I installed a plugin that does this automatically. It adds 3 random internal links on every post.

The link are quite random, words like "the" "this" etc are getting linked to posts. Is this good from a SEO perspective?
I think not?

My advice is to delete that plugin, as it is completely wasting the power of internal anchor text and by linking to single stop words, is providing zero usefulness to visitors, and is diluting any link power a page may have with useless 'random' linking, so yes it is not good for SEO or anything else.

You can manually code automatic anchor text linking into Wp templates, but each link has to be done manually and the links will be site-wide i.e. whenever the anchor text is used.

One way to overcome this problem, is to write a complete set of (keyworded) articles so that you have fixed amount of inter-linkable content all ready in one lump, i.e. a content silo

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webby0031

8 years ago

Originally Posted by Tim3

and is diluting any link power a page may have with useless 'random' linking

Erm no.

mate this plugin is probably good, I bet a lot of your pages dont have links on so the Link juice will hit a brick wall. By adding this prlugin you have given the juice somewhere to flow ( even though it may be a shit keyword )

So no using this is worse that using it.

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Tim3

8 years ago

Originally Posted by webby0031

Erm no.

mate this plugin is probably good, I bet a lot of your pages dont have links on so the Link juice will hit a brick wall. By adding this prlugin you have given the juice somewhere to flow ( even though it may be a shit keyword )

So no using this is worse that using it.

On the contrary, all of my pages have links on and I take a great deal of time to ensure they are useful, relevant and flowing juice to all the right places, and I politely suggest other folks do the same for any half-decent site.

Linking a stop word for the sake of it, to me, is counter-productive especially when a site only has 100 or so pages like the OP's site in question, when it could be done properly in an hour or two.

No disrespect intended toward to the OP, but it sounds like he is trying to shortcut things, because he is not planning his content ahead and/or did not organize his site structure properly before building his site from the off.

To me, placing random links on a page to other random posts not strictly related to the content of that page is not good SEO.

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Craigcmatthew

8 years ago

Originally Posted by Tim3

On the contrary, all of my pages have links on and I take a great deal of time to ensure they are useful, relevant and flowing juice to all the right places, and I politely suggest other folks do the same for any half-decent site.

Linking a stop word for the sake of it, to me, is counter-productive especially when a site only has 100 or so pages like the OP's site in question, when it could be done properly in an hour or two.

No disrespect intended toward to the OP, but it sounds like he is trying to shortcut things, because he is not planning his content ahead and/or did not organize his site structure properly before building his site from the off.

To me, placing random links on a page to other random posts not strictly related to the content of that page is not good SEO.

Thanks for the advice to all of you.

The reason why I decided to use this plugin are the following:
* To link to old articles that are buried deep due to little interlinking. I also have a static homepage and sidebar contains the popular posts, so even new content cannot be easily found.
* To increase crawl rate. I guess this is my own logic and I could be wrong. I'm assuming more internal links = higher crawl rate = better indexing. Now the fact that the anchor texts are random and irrelevant are a problem that I fixed, see below.

You are quite right Tim, I was looking for a shortcut. And I sort of found one with this plugin.
Here is the plugin: https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/content-links

Here's what you do after installing the plugin:
* there's a list of "black words" you can add that will not be linked. Ideally you just add all the "stop words" to this list and that should be the end of it. But what you need to do is manually remove all the "stop words" from the category page as there will be a new box there. Just keep anchor texts that seem a little more relevant than "the" "it" "because" etc.

What I did was this, I removed the whole anchor texts list and went to my search console > google index > content keywords. I copied all the content keywords and added them to my anchors list. So now the most popular and relevant keywords on the site are randomly linked to other articles. Sometimes the links make sense but most of the time they don't. Although I can say that the crawl rate and page views per visitor have increased.

My worry now is google penalty. The passing of "link juice" I don't fully understand how that plays out in this situation. Opinions welcome.

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webby0031

8 years ago

Originally Posted by Tim3

On the contrary, all of my pages have links on and I take a great deal of time to ensure they are useful, relevant and flowing juice to all the right places, and I politely suggest other folks do the same for any half-decent site.

Linking a stop word for the sake of it, to me, is counter-productive especially when a site only has 100 or so pages like the OP's site in question, when it could be done properly in an hour or two.

No disrespect intended toward to the OP, but it sounds like he is trying to shortcut things, because he is not planning his content ahead and/or did not organize his site structure properly before building his site from the off.

To me, placing random links on a page to other random posts not strictly related to the content of that page is not good SEO.

I make $19K a month what do you make ? I Wasnt talking to you anyway I was advising the op

Thanks
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Tim3 8 years ago

Originally Posted by webby0031

I make $19K a month what do you make ? I Wasnt talking to you anyway I was advising the op

If you wasn't talking to me, then in future don't quote my post or make it clear whom your are addressing.

... and being rude to me for no reason has no effect
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- yukon Banned 8 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by Tim3
  
  If you wasn't talking to me, then in future don't quote my post...
  
  LMAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
  
  Thanks
  
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dave_hermansen

8 years ago

I agree with Tim. That plugin is useless and will hurt your SEO, if anything.

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Mike Anthony

8 years ago

Originally Posted by Craigcmatthew

I have a blog with about 100 articles and it was getting really difficult to manually interlink them all. I installed a plugin that does this automatically. It adds 3 random internal links on every post.

No comprende. In a blog with good navigation (top side and bottom) articles are already interlinked. You can use a side bar to interlink critical articles. If you were trying to build relevance or something then maybe (dubious) but with generic words of no use.

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yukon

Banned 8 years ago

Originally Posted by Craigcmatthew

I have a blog with about 100 articles and it was getting really difficult to manually interlink them all. I installed a plugin that does this automatically. It adds 3 random internal links on every post.

The link are quite random, words like "the" "this" etc are getting linked to posts. Is this good from a SEO perspective?
I think not?

Odds are you're overwhelmed because you're not breaking the site down into categories.

Random internal links isn't focused on anything, the random anchor-text is even worse. Nobody wants to rank for useless stop words (ex: this).

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TomWest

8 years ago

[DELETED]

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Tim3 8 years ago

Originally Posted by TomWest

I strongly recommend you to read this article Two Awesome SEO Wordpress Plugins For Internal Links where you can find the required information.

Been in your bookmarks since 2010?

Neither of those plugins have been updated in at least 2 years, very dangerous for Wp sites.
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- yukon Banned 8 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by Tim3
  
  Been in your bookmarks since 2010?
  
  Neither of those plugins have been updated in at least 2 years, very dangerous for Wp sites.
  
  That's just Wordpress striking fear into devs trying to keep them active with Wordpress dev.
  
  Thanks
  
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hynds

8 years ago

Why don't you do it manually, I'm doing it this way. Because when you're writing at the composer, you add it very easy with the anchor text you choose, this will not take you much time. Doing this automatically may cause your current posts linking to another irrelevant content posts. I think so.

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Craigcmatthew

8 years ago

Originally Posted by hynds

Why don't you do it manually, I'm doing it this way. Because when you're writing at the composer, you add it very easy with the anchor text you choose, this will not take you much time. Doing this automatically may cause your current posts linking to another irrelevant content posts. I think so.

Because it's the internet and we are lazy!

In seriousness, automating processes is always welcome. In SEO that's hard to do because it requires a degree of human intelligence that cannot be automated or perfected. The website in question is a basic review site and I don't know how to interlink two product reviews together. I could but it would require a lot of thought and effort, kind of like "lawn mower x has 20 wheels which is better than lown mower y [insert link to lown mower y]". That requires effort and pre-thought which I tend to avoid. And when it goes to a 100 reviews it gets increasingly difficult.

I agree there's nothing better than a well thought out website, since I've already passed that point, random automatic linking is what I've resorted too.

Thanks
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MikeFriedman

8 years ago

Originally Posted by Craigcmatthew

Because it's the internet and we are lazy!

In seriousness, automating processes is always welcome. In SEO that's hard to do because it requires a degree of human intelligence that cannot be automated or perfected. The website in question is a basic review site and I don't know how to interlink two product reviews together. I could but it would require a lot of thought and effort, kind of like "lawn mower x has 20 wheels which is better than lown mower y [insert link to lown mower y]". That requires effort and pre-thought which I tend to avoid. And when it goes to a 100 reviews it gets increasingly difficult.

I agree there's nothing better than a well thought out website, since I've already passed that point, random automatic linking is what I've resorted too.

Yeah, definitely avoid putting any kind of real thought or work into your business. If there is one theme I have found among people who are a true success online, it is definitely to avoid hard work at all costs.

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Tim3 8 years ago

Originally Posted by Craigcmatthew

I agree there's nothing better than a well thought out website, since I've already passed that point, random automatic linking is what I've resorted too.

Things are not quite so critical with that type of site as you can autolink product name/model only for each occurrence, the only problem is when/if you don't want them linked.

Another quick and easier way of linking stuff together on review sites already built is to use tables of some sort, you can paste in a master copy and adjust things accordingly.
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hynds

8 years ago

Originally Posted by Craigcmatthew

Because it's the internet and we are lazy!

In seriousness, automating processes is always welcome. In SEO that's hard to do because it requires a degree of human intelligence that cannot be automated or perfected. The website in question is a basic review site and I don't know how to interlink two product reviews together. I could but it would require a lot of thought and effort, kind of like "lawn mower x has 20 wheels which is better than lown mower y [insert link to lown mower y]". That requires effort and pre-thought which I tend to avoid. And when it goes to a 100 reviews it gets increasingly difficult.

I agree there's nothing better than a well thought out website, since I've already passed that point, random automatic linking is what I've resorted too.

If you're using Wordpress, there's plugin call Shareaholic can do that. This can help you to show randomly maximum 16 posts below your post. Below is my example for this, section "You may also like:" here Godaddy renewal promo code 27% Off for any domain & hosting 2016
Hope this helps.

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Corey Taylor

8 years ago

Originally Posted by Craigcmatthew

I have a blog with about 100 articles and it was getting really difficult to manually interlink them all. I installed a plugin that does this automatically. It adds 3 random internal links on every post.

The link are quite random, words like "the" "this" etc are getting linked to posts. Is this good from a SEO perspective?
I think not?

These techniques used to work before 2010. Now you need to do manual high-quality work or outsource it.

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Automatic Internal Linking

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