We’re huge fans of Christoph C. Cemper – the man in orange and the SEO with an enormous amount of onsite knowledge. In his September 2019 BrightonSEO talk, he spoke about the value you can get from building internal links – a strategy that he claims doesn’t get penalised by Google.
Overview
- Speaker: Christoph C. Cemper
- Position: Founder & CEO
- Company: LinkResearchTools
- Twitter: @cemper
- LinkedIn: https://at.linkedin.com/in/cemper
- Slides: Awaiting slides.
What was the talk about?
We established in our April 2019 review of Chris’s talk that there’s a lot more to him than his bright suit. Specifically, we noted that he smashed the notion that SEOs should focus primarily on external links. Why? Because your own website is a prime piece of link juice real estate and using internal links is the way to bump up its value.
Chris opened with a simple argument – the actual point of links is to connect people and people often forget this. With this in mind, he raised one of the biggest mistakes people make with their internal links – referring to their blog from a subdomain and believing this to be an internal link.
He argued that you can take a much more aggressive stance in your internal link strategy. Why? Because he’s never seen Google penalise a website for its internal links.
Some of the other great tips that we picked up from Chris were:
- Use “money words” in your anchor text – think about what you’re selling what you want to rank for.
- Make sure your anchor text isn’t too long.
As the title of Chris’s talk states, he used seven popular sites to show where they were going right and wrong in their internal link building. While there were plenty of useful lessons we learned from these seven sites, it was CEWE that offered the most glaring. Chris showed that CEWE was branding its internal links. He explained that this looked spammy to users and we have to agree with him.
Favourite quote
“I’ve never seen a website penalised by Google for its internal linking.”
Potential impact on the industry
Every link builder knows how valuable it is to get a placement on a great external website – it could be the difference between a campaign sinking or soaring. However, that doesn’t mean you should forget about internal links, because they can offer a much more manageable way of boosting your rankings. So, don’t forget the value you can get from links on your own website.
Key takeaways
- Include money words in your anchor text.
- You can be more aggressive with your internal links.
- Don’t use long anchor text.
