Ethan Smith: commitment

Transcript context

…Cool, we'll definitely link to that podcast. A few more questions I definitely want to get through and then we can wrap up. One is I know you're a big proponent of internal links and the power of internal links and how that's often a underappreciated lever for growing SEO. Can you talk about that? Yes. So I mentioned I worked at this e-commerce company in 2007. And in 2007, Google Search Console had a report of all of your pages and the number of internal links. And they have that now, but the data are not all available, so it's not clean data. But then it was actually real data that was comprehensive and complete. So we could literally download and we had millions of pages and millions of products, and I could download the entire set of every URL and the number of internal links that Google found. And we had a bunch of product pages that were not getting traffic. So I wanted to understand why. So I got that, all the URLs, all the internal link counts. Then I got traffic, and then I basically did a correlation and I found that pages with more links got more traffic and pages with fewer links got less traffic. So again, to the earlier question of how do we generate our hypotheses? We analyze data, we look for patterns, we generate a hypothesis. I think that links cause traffic. Test that hypothesis. So we made a change where we added more links to these products that had no links, and by links I mean links from within the site. So within the site we're linking to these products more. And then we saw a huge increase, I think it was 300% increase in traffic to these product pages. And so then we were able to draw a clear causal relationship. And that was in 2007. That still works and that's still a thing. So I would say probably 90 to 95% of sites have this problem right now. And the reason why this is a thing is Google is crawling the web and your site through links, and if you don't have links, then Google doesn't have paths to find all of your pages. And it's not enough to put it in the site map, you need it. That's one link. You need many paths for Google to find pages and the more paths the better, up to a certain point. Usually at least 10 links, Google needs to find a page and crawl it regularly enough to give it enough credit. And 90% plus sites don't have this. The reason why is because internal link algorithms are typically either facet based, recommendation based, or popular based. So for facet based, what I mean by that is for Thumbtack plumbers in San Francisco, they'll link to other cities and other service types. Or related will be, and basically you'll have silos. So you'll have pages, you'll have cities that maybe they're not popular enough they didn't get linked to, you'll have other services they didn't get linked to. And so you'll have these gaps in the site where you didn't have enough links to some of the pages. Popular, you're always going to have the same 10 most popular posts on every single page. And the other posts that are not the most popular don't get linked to. Most recent, same thing. You'll only link to the most recent ones and not to the ones that are not the most recent. Related similar. So related algorithms are based typically on people who viewed this other thing. same thing. You'll only link to the most recent ones and not to the ones that are not the most recent. Related similar. So related algorithms are based typically on people who viewed this other thing. And if you have a post that didn't get viewed a lot, you don't have data for that and then it doesn't show up in the related algorithms. So related algorithms tend to skew towards a subset of pages. And so typically what you'll see is if you crawl, so you can look at this by getting Screaming Frog. So this is a good use case from Screaming Frog, scrape the whole site, you'll get an internal link count, it's called unique end links and Screaming Frog. And you'll see a power curve where 5% of pages are getting 95% of links. It's very extreme usually. Then you can see that a bunch of pages on your site get zero links or one link. We'll usually look for at least five links, ideally 10 to say that this page has enough and frequently they won't. And none of these algorithms that I just described are going to solve it. So facet based related, popular, recent, none of those are going to spread enough links everywhere. And so then when you fix it and you spread links everywhere, then traffic goes up. And essentially what you want is you want a shortest path from crawl point. So what I mean by that is a crawl point is where Google enters your site. Google enters your site at your homepage, but it also enters your site on any popular page. So if your mobile app page gets lots of links, or you have a press release that gets lots of links, all of these are places where Google is entering your site frequently and it has a lot of authority. And what you don't want is you don't want every page to be very far away in your link graph. You don't want it to be very far away from these crawl points. You ideally want as few hops or as few levels of your site from those crawl points. You don't want to hierarchal tree structure, you actually want a very flat wrap. So how do you actually build this? This is a lot of work. So back to getting things done, this takes a lot of effort. So we actually built our own. At Thumbtack I worked on their internally link algorithm and then at the shopping site that I mentioned in 2007, we did the same thing. So we've rebuilt that a few different times, but regularly the scope was too high. So we basically built that in house. So we have an ATI that can power this on any site. We have it live on a bunch of sites, we have it live on Upwork. And the other sites seen really good lift from that. But consistently we'll see if you don't have good link spread, fixing it has significant opportunity. Typically 25% plus opportunity, even like 100% opportunity sometimes if your links are really under optimized. So this is probably anything that I can recommend to companies as the quick win, the thing to do at the start, it's this.…

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