Internal Linking and Site Siloing

Today we’re going to talk about the proper way to contextually internally link from content to content and content to PLP & PDP pages.

What are contextual internal links?

Contextual internal links are anchored phrases that link from content piece to content piece.

Something like the below example.

We’ve also spoken quite a bit about optimizing meta title and meta descriptions which help influence CTR from search results pages.

Where “optimizing meta title and meta descriptions” is the contextual anchor.  You can see this is a link if you hover over the text.

By default, you’ll want to follow this principle unless otherwise instructed for internal links.

The Different Types of Anchors

1) Generic

2) Notext

3) Image

4) Topic

5) Miscellaneous

6) LSI

7) Brand + Keyword

8) Partial

9) Exact Match

10) URL

11) Brand

For the following techniques, we’re going to bucket the above anchor text types into the following 3 groups.

Target, Miscellaneous, and URL/Brand.

Target Anchor Text Group

1) LSI

2) Brand + Keyword

3) Partial Match

4) Exact Match

Miscellaneous Anchor Text Group

1) Generic

2) NoText

3) Image

4) Topic

URL / Brand Anchor Text Group

1) URL

2) Naked Anchor

3) Branded Anchor

Remember these groups while you’re performing this technique as we’ll be referring to the groups down below.

How to Suggest Proper Internal Links from Blog Pages

In this above diagram, you can see we’ve taken topic pages which are also known as blogs, articles, news articles, etc. and linked them together as well as linked them to our pillar page which is our “money page” or “target URL” in most cases.

This helps distribute topical relevancy and authority among blog pages and pillar pages.

What Anchor Text to Use for Site Siloing

Last updated 2020-05-05

Use the following combinations depending on what is desired.

Aggressive Anchor Text Combination

1) 50% Target

2) 25% Misc

3) 25% URL/Brand

Mild Anchor Text Combination

1) 33% Target

2) 33% Misc

3) 33% URL/Brand

Light Anchor Text Combination

1) 20% Target

2) 40% Misc

3) 40% URL/Brand