What to Do with Internal Linking after the April 11th Google Warning

Most of you, as SEOs, face the same challenge over and over again – to consider who we link and what we link from our websites. And this week, Google announced the following: linking to unnatural looking sites or in unnatural patterns will penalize you. It's not something that nobody have  seen coming. Every once in a while  the search engine finds new ways to reduce PR and the overall value of your links for the sake of spam control. But what are the onsite aspects of this latest change and how we can get benefits?

It turns out that internal links will have more power in the future. In other words, Google will reward internal links in a new way. So let's see what are the possible scenarios for now and how you can build up a strategy that will take you ahead of the competition.

The Screaming Frog Strategy

1. Use Screaming Frog and analyze with it the Google Search Console Search Analytics data. If you notice that a page on a deeper level is earning an interesting amount of traffic, you can opt to neutralize some of the level-creating internal links to that page from pages in higher levels. For example, a blog post buried in the archive can have higher traffic because of a new "evergreen posts" blurbs in homepage;
2. Use Screaming Frog by downloading the InLinks report and use it with Fusion Tables in order to visualize what URLs represent the most relevant nodes, hence use those nodes as spots (if justified) for placing those internal links that can help a page you want to be crawled frequently and to earn more Page Authority via link equity redistribution;

The Good Internal Links Will Bring Positive Impact 

So besides checking the traffic changes and redistributing, you can provide navigation, link off to specific pages ans categories – all that for the sake of indexing and crawling. Eventually, it would lead to higher traffic. So what are the first insights after Google's April 11th announcement?

You don't need to think twice about adding another link or reference to a specific category page;
Internal links tend to have the largest impact on already authoritative sites: some high-authority websites already made such redesigns – linking to strong pages in orde4r to get many pages deep in your site structure to get crawled and indexed;
It's prudent to remove manipulative links: a word on a page, on category-level page or blog-level page is a visitor-friendly linking. On the opposite side, links stuffed into footers, in deeply index pages or paginated versions of things will hurt the ranking of your site;
The main principle is to do changes for SEO, which are beneficial to visitors as well. An XML sitemap is an exception, though;
Footer links can be replaced by sidebars and top navigation links. Even in-content links are a better option;
High-authority websites with well-developed footers are an exceptions: it works when non-anchor text links go to all the properties that your site owns and controls;