The $50,000 Internal Linking Experiment: Links That Get Clicked Carry More Weight

0:00This guy spent $50,000 testing. Does it matter for SEO if people actually click links on a page? Can the position of the link give it more or less weight? So, would higher up links get more weight? I'm going to share this guy's post on Black Hat World. Then I'm going to share what a Google patent says on this. It is

0:20insane. This Google patent is insane. This guy's tests are insane. The results are insane. They confirm things that a lot of people in SEO thought, but didn't have direct evidence for. So, this poster Digital Media Lab says, "I've been in SEO for the last 9 years. Built and sold multiple web properties with my

0:39core focus being on content websites. Ever since AI came out, I've been dabbling in ways I could leverage its content creation, analysis, and all other features to my website's portfolio. One thing I've realized early on is that my internal linking process was hella inefficient. So, I started figuring out how I can improve it. I started with a G sheets automation, then moved to Python and ChatGPT API. The more I invested and improved internal linking, the more money I was making through better ad RPMs and rankings. RPM means revenue per mill, so the amount of revenue you get for 1,000 views or impressions. I've realized I wanted to

1:15niche down to internal linking and build a tool for it. But to build the best tool on the market, I needed to base my ideas on solid data findings. So, for the last year I've been running so many different internal linking experiments on my portfolio of websites. I even went as far and ran experiments from friends and websites. In total, 15 websites were involved. I spent over $50,000 testing things out. A virtual assistant costs, content costs, SEO specialist, software, setting new websites, etc. Here are some of the most important findings. Get ready for this. I've seen up to 150% increase in ad RPMs with improved internal linking structure and higher

1:57volume of internal links. 10 plus internal links per page minimum. Across my portfolio of websites, this resulted in thousands of dollars for simply adding more internal links and having visitors spend more time on my websites. This was super interesting. I found no upper limit of internal links that you can add to the body of the content. I experienced no ranking decline for pages and websites where I added over 20 plus internal links. I started only having three to four internal links, then got that number up to 20 plus. My assumption is that Google will never penalize you or derank you because you have more internal links. The more the merrier,

2:35apparently. I still have to break 30 links on a single page, but I just don't see that being a problem. So, this post doesn't address page rank dilution, which means the more links you have on a page, the less authority each link gets because the authority is being diluted among links. But, there's this 2012 experiment from Dan Petrovic, where he tested if having a backlink from a high authority page still passes meaningful ranking value when that page has 4,225 followed outbound links. And get this, the linked test site jumped from position 79 to number three within about three weeks, which showed that even with thousands of outgoing links, the

3:19backlink still had a strong ranking effect. The test is called the page rank split experiment. And all of this flies directly in the face of what people have been saying with page rank dilution. But, we're going to dig into why this might be the case in a little bit when we talk about Google's patent on this. This Black Hat World post continues, and you're going to love this one. No more issues with crawled currently not indexed. Ever since I've taken internal linking more seriously, I stopped experiencing this issue. All my content gets indexed because it usually has at least five plus links towards and from that post to other content. I found five

3:54links to be a minimum number of internal links you need to add to ensure you are not experiencing indexing issues. This next part is maybe the most important. The higher the internal link on a page, the more value it has. Based on my findings, internal links placed at the top carried more value than the ones at the bottom and influence ranking significantly more. Internal link clicks matter so much. Google puts a lot of value on your internal links being clicked. I've spent a lot of time tracking clicks for each internal link and saw a clear correlation with the ranking improvement. Then in the comments of this thread, this poster

4:32answered more. The poster talks about how the test was performed, said the $50,000 was spent on all of the tests to be carried out. There's a lot of costs involved to carry out a successful test, starting with people you have to hire to do some of the work, VAs, write new content, even though we leverage a lot of AI here as well, tools, website development, etc. This poster said regarding opening links in the same or new tab, if it matters. The poster said, "I haven't noticed any ranking difference between opening internal links in the same or new tab. My personal preference is to keep the same

5:06tab." How about this? Does it matter if links are on topically similar pages? The poster said, "All my experiments showed that internal linking is best done by similarity. Putting restraints based on category or a tag doesn't make sense when you can build internal links site wide and improve more content by having a wider pool of pages to link to. So, he means having internal links should be chosen based on how semantically or topically similar the pages are, not based on whether they share the same category or tag. And then, the placement of the links. The poster says, "When I said internal links at the top carry more value, what I mean

5:43to say is that they don't need to could at the top of the article, like in the introduction, but at the top relative to the other internal links. I am always numbering the internal links. The first one that I place is number one, the second one I place is number two on that page, and so on. But number one can be in the middle of the actual content if there are no other internal links above that one. So it is completely okay how you do it. So that's what this person's $50,000 tests showed about internal links. But how about Google's own patent? This patent shows they care

6:15about links on sites being clicked. The patent is called ranking documents based on user behavior and or feature data. And it explicitly describes collecting actual user behavior around links. In the patent, Google describes assigning link weights based on the resulting probability that a link will be selected. This is a quote from the patent. "Assigning a weight to the particular link, where the weight reflects the probability that the link will be selected." So links that get clicked carry more weights. But how is Google going to get this data? You might be thinking. The patent says, "The user behavior data might be obtained from a web browser or a browser assistant

6:54associated with clients." Immediately after this, it says, "The web browser or browser assistant may record data concerning the documents accessed by the user and the links within the documents, if any, the user selected." So they get it from Chrome. They get the click data from Chrome, just like they do with their SERPs. Or maybe they get it from Google Analytics. But it's very clear that they care and they're trying to measure whether links on a page are clicked. So there's a concrete example in this patent. If page W links to X, Y, and Z, and users click W to X twice, and W to Z once, those are recorded as

7:33actual positive click instances. Then these real clicks are used to train a model predicting which links are more likely to be clicked. So, in Google's patented design, they can observe clicks on links on ordinary third-party websites, even if that site itself wasn't being accessed with Chrome, had no Google Analytics or special tracking code, just because of this model. So, the patent uses these observed clicks as training data, then builds this model to predict how likely a link is to be clicked based on features like position, anchor text, contacts, source page, target page, and whether the links are on the same domain. This is a quote from

8:13the patent. "Model applying may assign weights to links based on the dynamic model generated by model generating. A link's weight may reflect the probability that the link will be selected." So, really, it seems like links that get clicks matter so much more, even for pages that have thousands of links. So, link juice actually isn't spread evenly among links on a page. And this would explain Dan Petrovic's 4,000 link experiment where a link still has value. Maybe Dan clicked it using

8:43Chrome. Maybe other people clicked it. Maybe the position said that it was valuable. Literally, in Dan Petrovic's experiment, he says, "Is it worth getting a link from an authoritative domain and/or high-page rank page which has thousands of outgoing links on it already?" Yes. Back to this Google patent, it's worth noting this one is expired. And as a lot of people know, just because Google has a patent doesn't mean they're going to use it. But, we know for a fact that Google cares a lot

9:10about clicks with their Navboost system. Google measures clicks in the search engine results pages. Google measures pogo-sticking, so clicking on a page, then going back to the search engine results pages because you're dissatisfied with the page that you clicked. Google measures all this stuff to see if people like the results. Yesterday's episode was about how Google admits they don't understand the content on a page. They fake understanding it by

9:34using behavioral signals like clicks. That's episode 1,162. Google admits they fake understanding your content. So, it stands to reason Google would also value link clicks on a page. So, whether it's an internal link or it's an outbound link, it looks like it matters whether or not it gets clicked. That's going to improve the SEO of the page that the link is on because it shows people are interacting with that content. Then the pages that are linked to receive more authority if their links are clicked. But hey, what do you think? Have you seen this yourself? Have you observed that it matters more for SEO if your links are

10:12clicked? Let me know in the comments. I really like all this stuff. This is so fun. And if you want to know how to find keywords where people actually want to click because they're looking to achieve something and how to make content that gets people to click, my SEO course shows you that. The course is designed around finding keywords where people are looking to buy something, use something, or make a discovery call. When they get to the pages that address their search intent, they click to get the thing that they want. The course shows you exactly how to make these pages, how to structure your site for these pages, how

10:42to find these keywords, how to do an SEO technical audit, how to build links, examples in every niche. Everything is in this course. If you haven't checked it out yet, check it out. You're going to love it. You can get it at compactkeywords.com. That's everything that I got for you on this episode of the show. This is episode 1,163 of the podcast. 1,163 days in a row doing this show, going strong. If you watched this episode on

11:13YouTube, 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. When am I When am I talking to you again? I won't going to I'm kind of forgetting. Oh my gosh, it's tomorrow. I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye

11:31now.