Internal in-content linking practices have remained the same for the past twenty years, which is strange because Google has gone through dramatic changes within the last ten years and even more so in the past five. It may be time to consider freshening up internal linking strategies so that they more closely align with how Google understands and ranks webpages.
Standard Internal Linking Practices
When considering a new way of doing something, it’s important to keep an open mind because what follows will almost be startling, like a slap on the face.
Raise your hand if this is you:
An SEO is writing or updating content and comes across a keyword phrase that’s a match for the keywords targeted by an inner page, so those words get turned into anchor text.
Okay, you can put your hand down. 🙂
I expect that there will be a lot of hands raised and that’s okay because it’s how everybody does it.
As an example, I visited a so-called “white hat” website that offers an SEO-related service and in an article about a sub-topic of “internal linking” they link to another page about What Is Internal Linking using the anchor text “internal linking.”
The target page is an exact match for the two-word phrase targeted by the second page. The standard practice is if you find a keyword match for another internal page then turn it into an anchor text to the target page, right?
But it’s not right.