Did an exercise on a client site this week that I think more people should do before spending anything on new links.
Pulled the top 30 pages by referring domains. Out of those 30:
– 11 were old blog posts (a few from 2019)
– 6 were the homepage and about/team pages
– 4 were 404s or redirected somewhere random
– only 2 were the actual service pages that make money
Then I checked how those top pages linked internally to the service pages. Mostly they didn’t. The most linked blog post (48 referring domains) had zero links to any service page.
So we added 1-3 contextual internal links from each of the top blog posts to the relevant service page, fixed the 404s with redirects, and waited. About 6 weeks in, two service pages moved from page 2 to mid page 1 with no new external links at all.
Do you do this routinely before new link campaigns? How many internal links from a single strong post do you think is too many?