Interlinking on A Large Site Question

[CaptainHustle]

When you are building a big site with perhaps thousands of pages, how do you stay on top of the interlinking. Some ways of doing this that I can think of are:

1. Link to 3-4 pages from the same category.
2. Do your kw research in silos and just link all of them and only then together.
3. Just link whatever seems relevant without a lot of thought going into it with the only intention of passing juice and more crawls.

 

[MrMedia]

I have been using link whisper lately and find that it works very well.

I set the link type to find link opportunities within the same category to maintain "silos"

No affiliation.

 

[Ryuzaki]

At this level of thousands of pages, part of interlinking becomes more about technical SEO and crawling and trying to reduce click-depth. @turbin3 used to talk a lot about this if you're interested in that side of it.

As far as spending inordinate amounts of time on the task, I wouldn't. Link Whisper seems like a way to cut down on the time spent.

On sites that I know will get big, I do 3 thinks for every post and then I never think about it again:

1. I link from this newer post out to as many older posts as there are relevant chances as I'm publishing. Sometimes I'll create those chances, too.
2. I create a static (not dynamic) "You may also enjoy:" list of links at the bottom of the posts. Basically a "related posts" widget that doesn't change which posts are shown. Literally an unordered bullet text list of links. Quick and easy.
3. I publish and immediately search the main broad keyword of the new post and open up 5 or 6 of the most related posts and find opportunities (or create them) to link back to the new post.

Once the site gets to 1000+ pages, there's more to gain by spreading the love in this way than trying to tightly weave silos, mainly because you can't fight it anyways without spending too much time or abandoning opportunities to interlink just to maintain some structure you have going.

You can always go back and craft relevancy nets that flow that relevancy and extra page rank in one direction, but trying to really wrangle it in is less important than ensuring crawling and page rank is flowing freely. Big sites really can benefit from the "spread the love and raise the whole tide" rather than manipulating the flow of the page rank.

 

[zelch]

Linkwhisper saved us a ton of time also. You can let it pick all the links for you, or you can use it to discover potential anchor text throughout your site and pick and choose which of its suggestions you want to use.