The First Rule of Internal Linking (That Most SEOs Ignore)

You wrote first rule of internal linking club for SEO. Your internal links should be changed monthly. If you don't keep tweaking them, you're breaking the first rule of internal linking club for SEO. And I I sent this to you and I said, "Let's do a podcast on this." And you are gracious enough to agree. So, David Quaid, welcome back to the show. Thanks so much. Thanks so much, Mr. Editster. So, um, yeah, I'm glad you picked up on this because I think this is something I see people missing a lot. Uh people are talking a lot about it on X. Uh people are talking about like automating it potentially which I think is very very dangerous. Um and I think it in part stems from the sort of like Google spider story. It's like an adult fairy tale where the spider comes along and and I can see so many myths shooting off from this, right? Like I think people assume that it picks up your site map and it starts crawling all the URLs. And I don't think people realize that the bot that's reading your site map doesn't crawl the URLs. It actually puts those into another crawl list. If that page has no authority, it's going into a diluted pool. Right? So there's basically a number of pools. It's triaged. It used to be into three. Now it's like five. I don't know. Could be any number. But the lower the pool, the more pages per bot. the higher authority, the less pages per bot, so you get crawled faster, right? And it's at a page level. And I think people think that if you that you're supposed to link your pages out to other pages and it helps Google understand your site and all of that. And that just couldn't be further from the truth, right? I don't want to get into like how smart or how not smart Google is. And I don't want to hear like LLMs, LLMs. It's just not that smart. So basically, if you've got a a a money page and you write a lot of blog posts and they're all supposed to link to that, if those blog posts aren't ranking, they're not doing any good, right? So, it's kind of like you can't really start you can't open up a business account and start writing checks until your invoices land, right? So, if your invoices aren't landing, then don't worry about writing checks. go worry about. So, if you're if you're building blog posts and you want those blog posts to link to your, you know, your ant colony step counter app uh page, right? They've got to rank first and you've got to use them to help each other rank. So, a big part of your SEO SOP, right, your standard operating process should be what what am I linking to? If that page is ranking, do I need that many pages linking to it? Right? So, if it's a if it's like a people also ask page like we we created in in our um quick 5minute hack, you could probably take them away once they start ranking. If it's a keyword difficulty 75 page, you probably don't want to remove those links, right? So, I always say I always use the word judiciously. I love the word judiciously, right? Think of it as an expense account, right? Every time you create a link, it's expensive. You've got to know what it's what you're investing that link in. If you just have like a page with 50 links in it, you're really really not very well invested, right? If you've got if you've got pages linking to a page that can't rank, you're better off moving them to another page. So, this idea that you because a lot of people also ask like how many is too many links before it gets spammy. And I think that's because they think internal links are like free authority and and again that's just not true. It would be great if they are, right? we could all just all rank for everything. It'd be fantastic. But um if you put 50 links on a page, you can you can be pretty sure it's not helping, right? So that's why I don't like automated tools and and when I come across new projects where they're there, I'm like, "Okay, we need to strip this out carefully but quickly." Um so know what pages are ranking. Um don't just link because you want a page to rank. I was um talking to a mutual friend of ours on X and he was um giving advice to somebody who was like they got fed up of uh buying links. So they're building their own private blog network. Um and I said well the problem with building a PBN is you need a PBN to help the PBN rank, right? It's it and they're like oh I just don't care as long as the pages rank. And I'm like well if the pages rank and don't get traffic then don't expect much. So, it's not an explicit rule from the original page rank patent. It's an observed um rule, right? So, I I can't say it always applies. Like um I know grumpy SEO guy thinks that very very high authority pages it doesn't count. But, um there's a couple of caveats with that, right? If you look at at sites with like high DA and then you look at specific pages where you're trying to get links from, if that page doesn't have traffic, it doesn't matter if the DA is 90, right? That page, if a page isn't indexed, it's certainly not sending traffic. But the idea that pages just need to be indexed give you page rank, it doesn't apply anymore. And so I think the safest bit and and that's why when we did our our our SAS SEO podcast, which I really love because that what I love doing the most, it's much better to chase pages that have traffic. So working with a partner, right? Um that's why I think like website owners, web agency owners and and digital marketing agencies should host things like open coffee clubs because they can connect businesses, right? You know, if someone's doing your recruitment, why not ask them to write a blog post about your company and what you do and then help them get traffic to that, right? So, first rule of link building club is always be monitoring what you're linking to. It's like it's like your stock account, right? All right. So, the the idea is when a page ranks and gets clicks that aren't resulting I mean good clicks. So like it it's ranking, people aren't pogo sticking. Uh that in itself actually generates authority. You don't need a backlink to generate authority. You can have a page that ranks for an easy keyword and that is generating authority. And now you can take that authority and channel some of it to other pages on your site that you want to rank. And so you you take this page that is that is generating authority because it's ranking and you internal link that to a new page and then that new page which previously was not ranking maybe it was crawled not indexed now it is but you you feel like you optimized it well and it should be ranking now it is ranking and you say great this this other this page that previously wasn't ranking is now ranking. So then you so then you take that first page and you internal link it to something else that you feel should be ranking and then that new page is ranking and you take the other page that is ranking and you internal link it to maybe page C or another page and you keep doing this and you and now you have all of these assets that are generating authority and you can interlink them strategically to pages on your site that should be that you feel should be ranking or needs a little bit of an extra boost. Is that a good way to explain it? Absolutely. Yeah, that's cornerstoneing at its heart. That's modernday page rank for people that, you know, need authority. That's exactly it. This method of marketing is so effective, I had to make sure it wasn't against Google's rules before I kept doing it. It's a form of SEO I call compact keywords. Whereas most SEO focuses on putting up articles to answer questions, how, what, when, compact keywords focuses on putting up dozens of pages that sell to searchers who are actually looking to buy. These pages rank on Google and convert so much better than normal that when I discovered this years ago, I couldn't believe this was allowed. It's less work, too. The average compact keywords page is only 415 words. Compact Keywords is a 13-hour deep course on getting sales with SEO. A customer recently said, "Each lesson is dense with information. You're giving years worth of experience boiled down into 15 to 30 minute lessons with no filler or fluff. I feel like I'm gaining a new superpower. Compact Keywords is about setting up an SEO funnel that brings you sales for years and years and years. It works with AI. It's less work than traditional SEO and it makes way more money. You can get it now at compactkeywords.com. Back to the podcast. I I like to think of remember the um in science class like in in in uh when you're younger and you create a circuit board, you get batteries and then you start putting lights on it. The more lights you add, it starts to go down. Then you add another battery. Same thing, right? As you bring in links to one page, you have the dampening effect. So you start linking to other pages and once that page has got a rank but just be careful that you know if that page is in a very competitive space and there's a lot of rotation you want to make sure that you're you don't remove authority and sort of like break break the circuit right um and and and that's what makes SEO fun and interesting is you can't just extend indefinitely. You have to take a beach head and then rank for the next thing and then rank for the next thing. So, this is an extension of our PAAA hack, right? Once you've got those pages ranking, they're not going to all rank immediately, and some might get more traffic than others. So, you can use that to help the fifth one or the sixth one. Then, once they're ranking, you can take them all and point them at a conversion page or a download page or a signup form and then get that page ranking in Google. And um another good way to test it is look in analytics and see if you're getting traffic from that web page, right? So like especially for external links and that's also a good sign. So when can you can you talk about if there's a if there's a point when changing the internal links out becomes I mean you mentioned that like there are pages that just continually need more authority because they are they are targeting more competitive keywords. Uh, but are there like maybe you're targeting like easy keywords, is there a point where you are changing out internal links too much or as long as the page continues to rank and get clicked? Not really. So the more searches there are, the more rotation testing happens. And so because Google's calculating that at every auction, it calls them auctions from the page search point of view. um you want to be careful that you're not undermining the page, right? So, it's very much on a case- by case basis. If you're if your average position is a perfect one for 3 months, you're probably safe, right? If you see rotation like your average rot your average position is like 3.3, that means you're oscillating down below the curve, below, sorry, below the fold. And so you probably that's a sign you need more authority. Leave it alone or keep building more pages, you know, keep keep shoring it up. Keep adding to your topical authority, right? You wrote you also wrote Oh, go on. Sorry. I was going to say you're you're keep an eye on your topical authority, right? Like if you've got lots and lots of of traffic for those, you should be okay. Can you explain how people should keep an eye on their topical authority? Um, a good way is SER reports, right? And grouping keywords. And if you've got a distribution, right, like you've got three at one, three at five, three at 15, your your topic authority is developing. If you've got 20 keywords and they're all in like the first two positions, you're you're pretty much the topic authority for for the internet. Um and then looking at search console like um interestingly you see a lot of people ask especially newbies asking about um Google search console from an impressions and a click-through rate point of view which uh I think is is silly right click-through rate at a top level makes no sense it's very much at a keyword per page level and if you look at a day like even if just at a day and see what the change is per hours. If it's going up and down or rotating in and out or if you look at a 3-month period and it goes up and down like a sine wave, then you're still working on that. Um, one of the confusing data signals you can get is where you see it says an average position of one for like 60 impressions and people think, "Oh, great. You know, I'm averaging one." But what's actually happening is there could be 6,000 impressions, but you're actually going up and then coming down so far that you're not counting any more impressions. And so that one is only at certain times. And then Google's comparing your click-through rate versus other people's clickthrough rate and deciding to throw you in. And you're getting thrown back in either because of topical authority or backlink authority. So, while back links don't count as aren't as I guess as as much of the authority equation as they used to be, they're still very very important in the sense that if you start to lose clickthrough rate or you have pogo sticking, it's it can counteract it to a large degree. Do you see a difference between topical authority and authority that you would get like with backlinks? Because backlinks can also develop topical authority or is do you is topical authority only on site? So topical authority is the so the old page rank number just used to be a number between one and a billion or a trillion, right? And so now in my mind it's more like each topic and subtopic has an authority number as a whole. And so when the pa when a page links to you, its topical authority and the topical authority of the page are aligned, right? And where where you've got a topic and it's got topic coming in, those numbers are essentially added together. So it it sounds complicated, but it's really just shifted one point over by topic and then it's back into like an in long in number with this internal linking thing. If you took away, would you have a problem with taking away a link from a page that was ranking, but taking away that internal link means that the page is now an orphan page? So, all pages really need to be linked to from at least one place. That's a really good question. Um, I have seen orphan pages rank. Yes. Um, and and stay ranking. Um but um and and so one of the reasons for interlinking is obviously so spiders can discover them, right? But at this point your page is discovered. So unless you're going to go into rotation phase, it could technically stay there, I imagine, right? I I I need to test it. Um yeah, and I I mean, you know, for example, like if you've got a site map and also by the way, we're also talking about inbody links. I just remembered I I just um navigation links, footer links very very devalued, right? Their their value only comes from brute force, right? So we're talking about in page links here and my rule of thumb is to limit them to five. Um and so if you've got five blog posts, that gives you up to 25 links potentially. Right now, if you're very very low authority and you have a very low number of backlinks, you might even want to trim that five down to a two. Right? So, if you've got a page that's now ranking and you had a lot of pages that you used to help it get there, you would only have to trim a few and then you could have the least authoritative page still linking to it to prevent that page from becoming an orphan and potentially exiting out. Yeah. Um, the last thing that you wrote, so you wrote sending uh sending these internal links when you change them out. Sending them to pages that can't rank equals malinventment. Can you talk about that investment? Yeah. Oh, no. You meant to write. Okay. You you write to me to you meant to write investment. It's okay. It said malinventment. I'm like, what? Um, ADHD come back and read what I already wrote. It's okay. We all make typos. Um, so, um, if let's say you've got a page and you're talking about, let's say you're a local web design agency, right? And you're up in Connecticut and you're ranking for web design, branding, logo, Connecticut, and then you put up a blog post called web design. You just want to see like how far you can get at a national level. And you, it's like a keyword difficulty score of 92%. and you've only got like 10 back links and only ranking for Connecticut, you're not going to move that page, right? You might may move it from page 16 to 15. But so you may as well in the interim start linking to something else. So, one way you can do this is go to search console, look at your pages tab, look at the last seven days, not the last 90 days, cuz it's too far and you'll have too many peaks that shift the average out. And then change the filter to show you um keywords above or pages above um like say position seven. And then those are pages that are actually very close and only need a little bit more authority. And that's actually a really quick hack that you can say that you could do today. That means you don't have to create any more content. You can just adjust your internal links and by Monday you could be ranking and getting more traffic. Lowhanging fruit keywords. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Striking distance. That's what when we when I was at Dens, that's what we called them. We called them striking distance keywords. My old boss used to stay close enough for hand grenades striking distances. Well, actually, I mean, speaking of weapons, like I I kind of imagine this trick like a weapon. Like you're it's like you are taking you taking this page that is ranking and you are like you are aiming it at a new page and it's and you're firing the authority at this new page and that's boosting the new page and you and it's it's like a strategy and it it takes like like I guess a month to recharge or something. Exactly. It's like the game of civilization, you know, you build your capital city, then you build a settler and move out, and then and then you can support that city, and then you can expand out. But if you leave it too, it all it all crumbles very quickly. Um, and and I think that's, you know, if you wanted to summarize SEO, it's the marriage of content to authority. You know, like I know a lot of people, I guess the default belief is that Google can assess content. There's a lot of SEOs who believe it can. The the problem with it is there there's definitely cases where you can say, you know, this page says the capital of Paris of France is is Paris, right? And it's factually correct. But there's so much content that's opinion, observation, it could be ideological, it could be philosophical. Google can't weigh in on in those situations. And so the only way it can really measure it is like how do people react with it, right? So, I I wrote this exact this exact thing actually uh to a response to a negative comment on on one of my episodes. Somebody said, "All you effing people are liars and just sell dreams to people." And I said, "Hey, sorry to hear you feel that way. One of the things I try to do with this podcast is make SEO feel attainable and simple because I believe it is. It's mostly relevance plus authority plus avoid spam tactics and and like that." Absolutely. And and I really I also I feel like SEO is pretty simple for sure. It's it's it's very easy to generalize and we do that a lot as human beings. You know, we we we blame marketing for bad products. We don't blame the company owner or the product engineers, right? We just tend to blame marketing. Um we blame market, you know, we blame SEOs for a lot of things. It was it was funny seeing the verge come out of blaming SEOs for ruining the internet to come out to blame SEOs for ruining AIOS, right? Um um but I I think that Google has been one of the biggest democratizers of access to information. Um it's built more brand killers. We've had so much like if you look at travel um food information about healthcare SAS products growing out of everywhere it's it's been a massive player I think in distribution of wealth and opportunity. I, you know, I me I I meant to keep this show uh this episode short and just talk about this one thing, but I I I you know, something that I've been thinking about a lot lately is how there's a lot of um there's a lot of like old school SEOs, people who have been doing SEO for a long time like you have, who just absolutely hate Google and who hate SEO. And then there's people like you and you've been doing SEO for a long time as well and you love SEO. I don't know. I don't know if I could say you love Google, but you love SEO. And so I guess the last question, this show was was meant to be about this internal linking uh hack, which is so cool. Um, but now I I want to I want to ask you, why do you think so many old school SEOs, they've lost their love for the marketing channel? They're so they're kind of angry. And you after all of these years, you still love it. I think one is I recognize it for as Gary Alle says, it's a simple machine, right? Um, someone was someone is blaming SEOs for something and I said, "Well, look, I I work with cyber security companies and we stop people from getting hacked. I I'm never going to feel bad about my job." So, the hating of Google thing, um, I've also never chased any massive dreams. I've never built any big websites and been become a multi-millionaire from it and had that income taken away. So, I imagine if that happened to me, I would I would probably have a lot of beef as well. And that's that's happened to a lot of people. Yeah. Um and and I do empathize greatly with that and sympathize with it. And so I've also avoided spam tactics cuz I haven't needed to. I'm not saying I'm smarter or better than thou. It's not a I'm not taking any high ground here. I'm just saying I haven't had to. And so I never worry about and I never I'm never surprised that Google core updates can go past with nothing happening. I don't expect anything to happen. Um, there are changes in fluctuation. Scores change, pages go up and down, but it's never major. Um, I also think that a lot of SEOs and I I've seen Google being blamed for a lot of things that I think SEOs come up with and then they blame Google for dealing with it as spam. Right? HCU is a bad example, but there are a lot of instances where they've got it right. And um I can I can see how that influences that. Um and and I think there's also a lot of people who just assume that they have a right to traffic. And if if you if you look at newbies and you look at people, they start off and they go like, I've built the best website I can. And this is actually where I think Google's made a really really big mistake. Right? I I hate this um maxim that if you just write good content, they'll come. And an example I site often, urgent care has 458 million pages. They they can't all be bad, right? And they can't all be great. And you can't arguably create something that's better than all of them. It's it's really hard to So this idea that somehow you can just write good content and people will find you. I think I've said before that's kind of an elitist unhelpful approach. But the whenever you meet someone who's doing it for the first time and they say, "Oh, I wrote this great page and Google's not ranking me." And it's kind of like you can't really be that naive that you were the first person to write about urgent care, right? So there has to be some other mechanism and that just happens to be the mechanism and I just understand it and take it at face value. Mr. Oh, go on. Sorry. I was going to say that's why I think it's important for us to explain these things. You know, a lot of people get upset about oh you're you're you're stuck in the old world with backlinks and I'm like sorry but SEOs don't design Google, right? Google. No one from Google is listening to this taking notes, right? Maybe they're listening to it and having a laugh, right? But um that's how it works. Unfortunately, if you don't like it, blame Google. Yeah, sometimes I do wonder if SEO is listen if Google listens to some episodes of this podcast. I wouldn't be surprised. I did write in I did write a how does Google work from an infrastructure point of view? and I kind of laid it out like a data center and I actually had a couple of Googlers comment on it saying it, you know, at the time in 2015 that's pretty accurate. So, I was pretty pleased with that. I've had I've had some um some Googlers comment on my social videos. Like I I made actually I made a a video about the like driving directions trick in Google Maps and and someone at Google was like, "We got to fix this." I actually love that trick, by the way. Do you? Yes. Yes. I I I've had a few friends um a good friend of mine here who's who used to be a neighbor of mine in New Jersey um and he's got a couple of stores in Jersey City and we actually put lists of all the hotels. So when you click on it, it pops up with directions from the hotel and I think I I took that from your idea. Wow, that's cool. Mr. David Quaid, thank you again for coming on the show. This is a cool trick. Hope everyone tries it. This is episode 1,3 of the Edward Show. 1,3 days in a row doing this podcast. If you watch us on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening. And I will talk to you again tomorrow. B.