We first revealed the 10-page test at SEORockstars. Since then we have wanted to test the strength of internal links. Furthermore, we wanted to test different setups of internal linking structures to see which is the strongest. This is the first test in this series. In this test, we will test to see how many internal links it takes to move a test page from the #10 position to #1.
Test Downloads
Transcription Below
This was also Ryan Hough’s and this was with the 10-Page Test concept that I showed a couple of months ago. I was at Rockstars and what we are trying to do is how much a link, how much a factor, or how much a signal, how much its worth in ranking value. The thing that I really want to go away from, at the end of the day, are random numbers.
You’ve got an ahref of 25, and a DA of 30 and a TF of 12, so what? At the end, what does that mean for ranking? That is where I would really want to drive a lot of what we are doing, where we can make decisions that aren’t necessarily third party number determinants but are actually ranking determinants. We know that if we do this, it will do more for ranking.
What Ryan was doing here was that he was looking at internal links. If you remember back, we did a test on how many internal links match an external link and what we found there is 2. Two internal links of say 20, will equal 1 external link of a value of 20, is what we have found.
What Ryan is doing here on this test is, let’s say let’s take internal links and throw them into the 10-page test to see what we can do to move this up all the way to number 1. At the end what we found was it was three links. So he’s got his test page and he was firing internal links at that test page and it took three links to get to number one.
What to do with this? What I did was when clients asked me how many blogs do I need to write each month to rank or for it to be beneficial? I tell them 2-3 because I know that 2 will at least equal one same link of external value and I know that three is probably somewhere in there will get me the maximum amount of juice out of that play.
If I have a target keyword, how many blog should I do in a month? I do 2-3 and then what I do on those blogs specifically though is I only have one link in them and I have them linking to my target page. Basically I tell clients when they come to me that there is little point in writing content that is not going to benefit you in some way, shape, or form so if you are not writing content to support a specific target page, in my mind it is a waste of resources and we only have so much time and money to get our keywords ranked.
So what I do is I focus on writing blogs that support target pages and let’s do 2-3 a month per keyword. Obviously you have to make some trades. Maybe you do not have the bandwidth, maybe you are going for 5 keywords that would be 15 blogs in a month, that is a bit too much. Why won’t we do 3 of those so let’s do 6-9 blogs for these three and then kind of rotate them through. That is called putting an SEO plan together so you can then cycle things through.
Meredith: Pete asks, will there be an advantage to setting up sites on a wpmu site as far as duplicate content is concerned?
I think that the problem you are going to run into is trying to get those other sites to rank using the same content. You are going to ask Google to pick which one it likes the best and it will. Hopefully it would like the other ones and rank them up towards the top. Google may or may not. This is a little bit of an advanced concept but if you think about, in a test environment we have 5 test pages and they are all identical and we launch them and Google ranks them because there is something within the algorithm that forces ranking.
You’ve got 5 things, it is easy from a human perspective to think that there score then that maybe the top 1 is a 5, and a 4, and a 3, and a 2, and a 1 in terms of their value of whatever Google has assigned to it. But the thing is, it is probably not the case. Google might have assigned the first one a 5 but the next one a 3 and maybe a 1.5 and a 1.2 and maybe a .5.
So then when you put other things in that environment, they could wedge in between your pages. It is not as easy as say – I’ve got 1 and then Google is going to rank them all together in a live environment because it won’t. It has probably assigned specific value to those pages and then there are all those other pages in a live environment that are going to wedge in between because they have a site with a higher score or their value or metric in the algorithm, the number that comes out to it.
That is where you might run into problems. You might have a page and it would rank number 1 but that doesn’t mean that the exact same content on a different site on a wpmu or other environment is going to rank also because you are number 1 in the rankings. It might rank on three, it might rank at the 4th page, it might never rank because of the value differences and all those other pages and their scores wedging in between.
Meredith: Mark asks, how do you get those values? What tools?
When it comes to tools, I personally use MOZ and Majestic a lot. I know people use Ahref. We are just talking about numbers in a vacuum. If you’ve got a TF 20 external link and your site is TF 20, you would need 2 internal links to match that external 20.
Meredith: Clint wants to know, what is the crawl rate on the test site, how many days after the first index showed up did the bot came back to the page with the internal link? If you have submitted the site to Google URL submit, could you reduce the amount of days to see a result?
I think, this is just going on the top of my head, the crawl rate is 5 days and they were submitted which is what I usually see in terms of – you submit something to Google it can happen immediately, it can happen the next day but then it could also get into a kind of a regular flow of the site. I feel like the regular crawl rate was 5 days. I’ll check on that.
Could you reduce the amount of days to see the result? Oh I see what he is saying because he says this test took 41 days. It’s a weird thing within test environments, when we set up the 10-page test, they take forever. I am not 100% sure why.
We are not really doing anything differently from a 5-page test other than owning the entire 10 page of Google test results and the test just take a long time. It is really bizarre. I do not have an explanation for it other than Google wants to make us work to get real answers.
Meredith: That brings up something about that tool that we told you about – Botify – that these big corporate people are loving so much that just focuses on what pages on your site Google is crawling. Do you think Google is just giving us less crawl credits for a larger site compared to a smaller site?
No, I do not think so. The cache dates are all consistent. It is regularly crawled. It is not like it is crawled once and going away for once or two weeks, they are on regular kind of 5 day crawls. It just takes a longer time for results to hit on these larger environments.
Dori: So you are not talking about the indexing rate, they are actually the change rate once you activate a test?
That is right. So you have your 10 pages and then you do your one thing, that one thing that you are testing, in a 5-page environment, we would probably see those results a couple of weeks, tops. In this 10-page environment, it could take 1month. This particular one took 41 days to get movement. I’ve got one going that still have moved and it has been months and it is hard to write off that it is not doing anything because the only thing that we put into these tests are things that we know are factors.
Meredith: You usually have a hypothesis about anything Google does, do you not have one at all in that?
I do not really know, we’re working on it.
Meredith: One other question, Mike says sorry this is off-topic – have we done a test to see if the addition of a relevant outbound authority link benefits ranking?
Yeah, we did that with the .gov links going out and they did work and they did it where they weren’t even hyperlinked and it worked too. That was actually fun, not even hyperlinking because you also have to think of your link equity – you do not want to lose juice off the page. But it didn’t work with a niche relevant page that was high authority so, let’s say you’ve got a page about cats going to bestauthoritycatsites.com vs cats.gov. Do cats.gov.