Internal vs External Backlinks

Thursday, August 5. 2010

This is a great debate, and one that gets a lot of discussion in webmaster forums like digital point or netbuilders, and most people seem to come down on the side of one or the other. Essentially the debate is between on page SEO vs off page SEO.

A lot of MFA promoters tell you to create a small 3-5 page site, through some articles up on ezinearticles, add your Adsense code and wait, and in the past this system could be considered very successful, actually it might still be effective if you fly under the radar, but the bigger your site becomes, and the more traffic you get, the more you start to compete with established sites that do a lot more for their ranking.

I'm not going to sit on the fence, I'm going to tell you to do both, and I'm going to tell you why. You can do an experiment to prove how well this works if you have three new websites in the same niche and on different host accounts. Start a blog on each one, and give each blog maybe 5 posts of similar length, all targeting the same keywords.
To make the experiment even easier, forget about registering domain names, just grab a free blog from Blogger.com, Wordpress.com, and Blog.com, they all give you a subdomain so each blog would be competing fairly, instead of having a mix of top level domains, subdomains, and subfolders.

Then on one of the blog only interlink between posts using keyword rich anchor text, on the second blog don't interlink between posts instead only write articles for ezinearticles, and on the third blog do both interlinking and ezinearticles. Now ping the major RSS readers for each blog and sit back and watch your stats to see which one gets more traffic.

I'd be willing to bet that 90% of the time the two blogs with the ezinearticles will get traffic faster than the blog with only interlinking, but wait a little longer. Soon you'll see the blog with only interlinking will catch up with the blog that only has ezinearticles backlinks, but the blog with both will stay ahead of both of them and after 3 months will have several times more traffic than the other two.

OK, so that isn't an example, I'm not stupid enough to disclose my test blogs, that would ruin the test and I'd have to start again, but I can tell you that I used the results of this test to promote a client who has a website here in Spain and her little B&B that was previously only on page 4 of Google shot up to the #1 position in 2 months.

I did that by interlinking all of her content pages using her main keywords, plus wrote 3-4 ezinearticles for each page on her site, and then just sat back and watched. Of course real SEO never stops, and I'll need to keep adding backlinks and if she wants to target extra keywords she will need more content, but her reservations have increased, her booking ratio is above 50%, and she's very happy. Try this with your own sites, you'll see it works.
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in SEO, Traffic   Comments (15)

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  1. John@Retail Fixtures & Store Displays said,

    Thursday, August 5. 2010 at 19:10 (Reply)

    That s a powerful explanation that im agree on you,thank

  2. Carl said,

    Monday, August 9. 2010 at 19:28 (Reply)

    Thanks John, glad the explanation worked for you. A lot of people get very confused about the power of internal links, and a lot of people get frustrated with finding external links, so it's a good reminder that both forms of link work really well for SEO.

  3. Daniel Losada said,

    Friday, August 6. 2010 at 01:02 (Reply)

    Most definitely writing articles that link to every page on your website will make a difference. That is a really good tip.

    It may also be beneficial to make two links per article depending on relativity.

    For example, if you think people who click the links will benefit from it, then link it!

    Daniel, website designer

  4. Carl said,

    Monday, August 9. 2010 at 19:33 (Reply)

    Yes, a lot of people think they should only write articles that link to their homepage, but the more deeplinks you can get to a site the better it's overall strength.

  5. Andrew @ Blogging Guide said,

    Friday, August 6. 2010 at 11:58 (Reply)

    Great test! This is from your experience, proven and tested so it must be really effective. And yes, internal linking and article submission helps a lot. Your test includes submission to ezine only so imagine what will happen if you add to other article directories as well.

  6. Carl said,

    Monday, August 9. 2010 at 19:41 (Reply)

    Ezinearticles is the biggest article submission site, and everyone knows about them, so it's an easy site to use, but you're correct, there are a lot of other sites, some of them are niche article sites, others are just as large, though perhaps not so fussy.

    GoArticles for example appears in webmaster tools as a backlink fairly quickly, but I have a feeling they might be a discounted a little because there doesn't seem to be any human approval - articles get approved automatically. That concerns me and I wouldn't want to waste too much time using them, but to get a quick backlink they are useful.

    Recently there have been a lot of article sites starting up that use Wordpress, an article management plugin, and a special theme, and if you can find those the link can be quite good.

  7. Toronto Mortgage Broke said,

    Friday, August 6. 2010 at 21:39 (Reply)

    Ah good link source is digg, it has a nofollow link but ranks quickly on search engines...

  8. Courier-Beck said,

    Friday, August 6. 2010 at 21:53 (Reply)

    Re: Internal vs External Backlinks thanks mate for the advice - I have not really focussed on enzime articles yet will give them a crack over the weekend and link them to some internal pages - can you go on a bit further in regards to linking with key words internally - any tips there did you bold the key word and link it to a page thats relevant - one key word or a phrase?

  9. cat furniture said,

    Sunday, August 8. 2010 at 12:53 (Reply)

    Really nice theme. I think that both type of links should be placed according to the rules most SEs follow. Not less, not more. :)

  10. Tom said,

    Saturday, August 21. 2010 at 18:20 (Reply)

    I have been playing around with the same ideas for a while now. It is very important to bring all of your hubs, or blogs up in rankings and link between them. It becomes a web of a much more powerful site in Google's eyes this way. It also depends a lot on where those outside links are coming from as high page ranked sites count for so much more than if you just have a few brand new link farms pointing at your site.

  11. Mike@ San Diego Computer Repair said,

    Saturday, September 4. 2010 at 20:47 (Reply)

    Carl,

    I've tried this approach on one of my local sites and it worked very very well boosting my client to the 3rd listing on Google... They got 4 calls in one week... They were blown away...

  12. Steve Scott said,

    Sunday, September 5. 2010 at 00:30 (Reply)

    Great article, though I do some internal linking I have mostly been focusing on external (a lot of ezinearticles) Doing both really seems to make great sense as both practices work the synergy should work even better.

    Thanks for the info

  13. Douglas Adams said,

    Sunday, September 5. 2010 at 18:26 (Reply)

    I just started linking to deeper pages of my site. I will have to see how it works

  14. Seb from Dog Beds said,

    Monday, November 1. 2010 at 05:41 (Reply)

    Thanks Carl, a couple of months ago I would not have understood this article. Having been at this for a little while now, more things are becoming clearer. I appreciate it.

  15. SEO translator said,

    Wednesday, December 21. 2011 at 04:35 (Reply)

    Your experiment is in line with my own professional experience. You need both on-page and off-page SEO on your website, despite the stupid debate that you mention.

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