The $50,000 Internal Linking Experiment: Links That Get Clicked Carry More Weight

E1163: Does Google care whether people actually click the links on your page?

I break down a $50,000 internal linking experiment across 15 websites, plus a Google patent that describes assigning different weights to links based on the probability that users will click them.

The findings challenge a lot of standard SEO thinking around internal links, PageRank dilution, link placement, and how authority flows through a site.

In this episode:

- A $50,000 internal linking experiment conducted across 15 websites

- How increasing internal links produced higher rankings and higher ad RPMs

- What happened when pages went from 3 - 4 internal links to 20+

- Why the tester found no ranking decline from adding more internal links

- How stronger internal linking eliminated "Crawled - currently not indexed" problems across his sites

- How he found five internal links pointing to a page was an important threshold for indexing

- Why internal links appearing earlier than other internal links on the page produced stronger ranking results

- The click-tracking data showing a clear correlation between internal link clicks and ranking improvements