Wanted: Link
Wranglers Taming
your site's wild herd
Josep M Felip
Learning Technologies Group PLC
Speakerdeck.com/jmfelip
@jmfelip
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#BrightonSEO
SEOs
Internal links
Howdy Partners?Tired of seeing your internal links running
wild across your website like unbroken stallions?
Grab your spurs, saddle up and let’s lasso them into an
optimised herd. And let’s get your website galloping ahead
of your competition
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Why are internal links important?
#BrightonSEO
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internal links make bots happy
#BrightonSEO
That’s what they were created for! So let’s give
them links to discover and let’s pray to Google
almighty for all of them to be indexed!
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Better User experience
#BrightonSEO
Internal links guide
our users to the most
important pages where
they will discover
more content, spend
more time, reduce
bounce rate, and
hopefully…
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and hopefully
convert
#BrightonSEO
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Logical information structure
#BrightonSEO
Internal links help us
create a logical
information structure, for
SE quickly discover and
understand what the site
is about. By categorising
content we create topical
authority and we tell
Google our site is
relevant to users and
worth ranking
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Relevancy
#BrightonSEO
Internal links help us
to get more
relevancy. We can
influence the
relevancy of certain
kwds with the anchor
text and associate
specific kwds to that
page to improve
rankings
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Which links do we want?
#BrightonSEO
All those links that
can be more relevant
to influence the
destination page. Those
links surrounded by a
good semantic field,
from a page that
attracts good amount
of traffic.
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How do we get them?
#BrightonSEO
Ladies and Gentlemen, let me introduce you to
The Magnificent Three!
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+ +
The magnificent three
#BrightonSEO
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Config - Custom > Link Positions
#BrightonSEO
Open Screaming Frog,
go to the Crawl
config menu, Custom,
then Custom link
positions
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JM Felip -SEO Manager
Config - Custom > Link Positions
#BrightonSEO
Here are the
Semantic HTML tags
where SF is going to
look for links.
Awesome, isn’t it?
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#BrightonSEO
Well, not so fast cowboy!
There’s more than meet
the eye here…
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< header >
< nav >
< aside
< section
< section
< footer >
< main
Semantic html
#BrightonSEO
We actually want to
get the links within
the tag
(associated to a
class). Why?
Because there are the
links with more
potential to influence
destinationg pages,
surrounded with a
good semantic field.
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JM Felip -SEO Manager
Link Positions
#BrightonSEO
We tell SF to get
the links within
our selected class
for the
tag. In this case
“post_content”.
1. Click Add
2. Move it up just
below
1
2
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JM Felip -SEO Manager
getting blog class
#BrightonSEO
But how do we
get that class?
Easy! From a
previous regular
crawl.
Select a URL
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getting blog class
#BrightonSEO
Go to the
INLINKS tab and
look for the
Link Path colum.
There you’ll see
the class for
that link from
the Content
position
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getting blog class
#BrightonSEO
Here’s a bit larger. In this case we
only need what’s inside the quotes.
But what happens if we don’t have a
class?
Well, then we can use the ID
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getting id/xpath
#BrightonSEO
If there’s no class, it’s likely that the
main area has an ID. You just get this
path, the DIV where the ID is, and
chuck it into your custom link position
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Link Position xpath
#BrightonSEO
Like this.
Simple as pie!
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JM Felip -SEO Manager
Export links to gsheet
#BrightonSEO
Once we’ve run
our crawl it’s
time to export
our links to the
spreadsheet, our
warehouse.
We’ll select all
the URLs from
the crawl
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JM Felip -SEO Manager
Export links to gsheet
#BrightonSEO
Then, from the
lower part, we
go to the INLINKS
tab and select
EXPORT.
This will create
a CSV file that
we’ll export to
our Google Drive
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JM Felip -SEO Manager
Clean up your sheet
#BrightonSEO
x
x
Now that we
have our data in
the spreadhseet,
it’s time to clean
it up. Make sure
you exclude all
non-wanted links,
like these ones
from the Sitemap
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Taming links with looker studio
#BrightonSEO
From the template I’m gonna share with you, we connect our
spreadsheet to Looker Studio. There are 3 sections, broken down here.
This is the first one where you select the URL you want to focus on.
There are some handy filters (URL & Anchor).
You can see where all the links come from in the score cards.
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Taming links with looker studio
#BrightonSEO
The second area is
where we have all
the data for the
focus URL: where
the links come
from, anchor text,
the link position
and the number of
links
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Taming links with looker studio
#BrightonSEO
The 3rd area, at
the bottom, is where
you can see the
stats: where the
links come from and
the % of them over
the total.
To the right, you
see anchor texts
used and % over
total
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Taming links with looker studio
#BrightonSEO
In detail: we select the URL that we want to focus on.
Then you’ll see how all the data changes
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Taming links with looker studio
#BrightonSEO
Here we can see how all the data has changed and where
the links are coming from for that particular URL.
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Taming links with looker studio
#BrightonSEO
Here you can see we’ve applied the filter and we can
only see the links coming from the blog
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Taming links with looker studio
#BrightonSEO
And finally, here we can see the stats. Quite important:
how many anchor texts are we using to link to the
destination page. This is where you get creative folks!
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Results
#BrightonSEO
If we’ve done
our job well,
here’re the
results after
taming your
links and work
them out!
A bit more
than 20
positions up in
only 15 days!
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Results
#BrightonSEO
And here a
jump of around
30 to 60
positions up! In
only 15 days!
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Look for a unique class.
If not possible, create
your own or get the
xPath
#BrightonSEO
Takeaway
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Rename your new Links
position.
Place it always after
the Head
Takeaway
#BrightonSEO
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Connect to Looker
Studio using the
template
Takeaway
#BrightonSEO
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Looker Studio template
https://lookerstudio.google.com/s/
i9CGmeS4wVM
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/
1SuPCpEwpYWT9zx3trgqV3LT6lNJFQUjx
RCXPZPxRGnw/edit?usp=drive_link
spreadsheet
#BrightonSEO