An SEO professional asked John Mueller about internal linking during the Question and Answer segment of a hangout.
Their question was about internal linking and the effects of them on ranking. Is it recommended to highlight new content with channeling Link juice into it?
John explained that links are always one of those things where people have very conflicting feelings about it, because it is not really how Google’s systems look at them.
Regarding internal linking, John also believes this is one of the most important elements of a site, because it’s a great way for a site owner to tell Google what they would consider important on your pages. And especially like most websites have a homepage that is seen as the most important part of the site, and especially links that you can provide from those important pages to other pages you think are important.
This is really useful for them. And it can be that these are temporary links too. For example, if you have an e-commerce site, and you link to your new products from your homepage, then that’s a really fast way for Google to recognize new products and to crawl and index them as quickly as possible.
This also gives them a bit of extra starting weight when you’re starting off. Of course, if you remove those links, then that kind of internal connection is gone as well.
Regarding how quickly this is picked up, John assumes that it would be picked up immediately as soon as they recrawl and reindex those pages.
There isn’t any additional latency that Google would add, where they would say “This internal link was just now added, therefore, we’ll look at it in a week.”
From Google’s perspective, if they see an internal link, and they can follow it, then they go off and follow it as soon as they can.
This happens at approximately the 45:58 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 45:58
How quickly does Google consider the effect of internal linking and rankings, in terms of link juice? Is it recommended to highlight new content with channeling link juice to it?
John (Answer) 46:11
Wow, I don’t know. “Link juice” is always one of those terms where people have very conflicting feelings about it. Because it is not really how our systems look at it. With regards to internal linking, I do think this is one of the most important elements of a website, because it’s a great way for you to tell us what you would consider important on your pages.
And especially, like, most websites have a homepage that is seen as the most important part of the website, and especially links that you can provide from those important pages to other pages that you think are important. That’s really useful for us. And it can be that these are temporary links too.
For example, if you have an E-commerce site, and you link to your new products from your homepage, then that’s a really fast way for us to recognize those new products and to crawl and index them as quickly as possible. And to give them a little bit of kind of like extra starting weight when you’re starting off.
But of course, if you remove those links, then that kind of internal connection is gone as well. And with regards to how quickly that is picked up, I would assume that’s essentially picked up immediately, as soon as we recrawl and reindex those pages.
So it’s not that there’s any kind of an extra latency that we would add, where we would say, well, this internal link was just now added, therefore, we’ll look at it in a week. From our point of view, if we see an internal link, and we kind of can follow it, then we’ll go off and follow it as soon as we can.
