For small businesses, more links %3 more search traffic %3 times more customers. The tested pages still don't work where they started. It could be due to changes in the algorithm, because the links have not yet been re-tracked, or because other sites got more links while we lost them. But I'm hopeful that at least we'll get back to where we were.
However, studies have shown that links are still incredibly important for Google rankings. And a few years ago, Google said that links are among the top three ranking factors, but links aren't number one, Google said later. The second reason is that Google may have counted those links, but they were considered low value or not fresh. Think of a link on a page that is a broken link from a page that is 10 years old.
It doesn't have much traffic or it doesn't have any traffic. Nobody even visits this page. Third, we want to prioritize links with signs of freshness. We want to avoid these pages from 10 years ago.
Well, we don't necessarily need to avoid them, but we want to prioritize the most important pages. So what are signs of freshness? In general, we want to prioritize links from pages that receive traffic on their own, that are updated regularly, and to which links arrive. So you don't want to give your developers a list of 10,000 broken links and say: Hey, fix all this. They're going to get mad at you and you're not going to see how valuable it is.
So if you want some tips on how to fix broken links, how to find those high-value links, we have a video from Dr. Pete with tips on exactly how to do it with Moz. You can use a lot of other tools. Precisely for this reason, in Yoast SEO Premium, we have created a specific feature for internal links: the suggestion of internal links.
In the plugin's meta box or in the sidebar, as shown below, Yoast SEO's internal link evaluation checks if you've created links to other pages of your website in your text. Once you've decided which links should be on a page and which pages should have the link value, it's important to use the correct anchor text. This is not only because there are more links from the main page, but also because those links don't lead to several sub-levels of information. Then, when you write a post, you can immediately link to a related post by copying or dragging the link directly to the editor.
Instead of creating links to pages, I thought the easiest way to test this would be to remove links to a page and see what happened. Not only can a defined internal link structure contribute to a positive and intuitive user experience, but Google can also better understand the content of a site with clear and orderly internal links. This is compared to a deep hierarchical structure in which the index page links to high-level categories of information that then links to higher-level categories of information. When it comes to link spam, in technical terms, Google is advanced enough to check the relevance of pages by comparing the semantic distance between the entities linked within the semantic web.
Internal links connect the pages and posts on your website, and external links connect your pages to other websites. The value of the link that is passed to the next page will be divided by the links on that page, etc. Internal links are often much easier to create and manage than external backlinks, which are created when another website links from your domain to any other place on the web.