Internal Linking Grows Up: Evolving From Link Juice To Entity Maps via @sejournal, @Kevin_Indig

Let’s reminisce for a moment. Do you remember how, back in 2020, we all obsessed over “link juice” and PageRank flow as far as internal links are concerned?

In 2025, what matters more is how your internal links define the entities and relationships on your site.

Internal linking is no longer just about distributing authority. It’s about:

• Building your own semantic map that Google can trust.
• Reinforcing your topical authority.
• Earning a place in an AI-search-forward landscape.

The last full guide I wrote on internal linking strategies was in 2020, and – well – much has happened since then (to say the least).

And most internal linking guides treat links as simple “traffic routers,” ignoring their role in building entity context.

So today, yes, I’m revisiting some of the basic building blocks of SEO, but we’re going to expand how we think about internal linking.

If you’re already deep into entity-first SEO and apply it to your internal linking tactics, skip ahead to the action items to ensure you’re implementing it well.

For everyone else, I’ll explain why tightening up your internal linking structure isn’t just table stakes. It’s one of the simplest core levers to influence organic visibility.

Image Credit: Kevin Indig

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Internal linking is the age-old SEO practice of connecting one page on your site to another page, all on the same domain.

These links act like the roads or highways that guide users through your content. But they also help search engines understand how your pages relate.

In the past, we thought about internal links as “pipes” for PageRank.

Add enough links from your homepage or other strong, well-ranking pages, and you’d push authority toward the URLs you wanted to rank.

That view isn’t wrong; it’s just incomplete.

Today, internal links aren’t just distributing authority. They’re defining the semantic structure of your site.

Internal linking isn’t simply a practice that routes people (and bots/crawlers) to the pages you want them to go to.

In fact, when we think about internal linking this way is exactly when we start to half-ass the practice or let it sit on the back burner.

The words you use in anchor text and the way you connect hubs of related content all signal to search engines: These are the entities your brand wants to be known for.

Strategic internal linking can do three critical things for your site:

1. Reinforce entity authority. You’re signaling to Google, and everyone else, which concepts you want associated with your brand.
2. Improve index stability. Pages that are well-linked internally are more likely to be crawled often – and that means they stay indexed and are likely to show up in AI-generated results. (This is especially for Bing optimization, which seems to struggle more with indexing than Google. Bing is often forgotten when it comes to AEO/GEO because everyone assumes ChatGPT only uses Google, but it doesn’t.)
3. Drive user engagement. Smart placement and descriptive anchors help users explore more of your related content, increasing engagement signals.

Put simply: Internal links aren’t just SEO plumbing. They’re how you build a discoverable, authoritative entity graph inside your own site.

Generative AI being infused into all modalities of search means Google and LLMs aren’t just hiking all over the web searching for crawlable/indexable pages — search engines and LLMs are mapping relationships between entities and judging your brand’s authority accordingly.

But currently, there’s some disagreement on whether or not LLMs can navigate your site through internal links.

My hypothesis? LLMs do form entity relationships via your strategic use of internal links. But probably not through traditionally “crawling” them like search engines do, and more purely based on text signals on the page.

And if that turns out to be true – keeping in mind that LLMs often use search engine results to ground themselves – internal linking also benefits LLM optimization/AEO/GEO mostly by improving Google/Bing ranks, which LLMs heavily rely on.

I dropped the question over on LinkedIn, you can check out the discussion there. But a few responses stood out. (Take a look at the full thread, but I also highly recommend following these pros to learn more from each of them.)

Dan Petrovic, founder and CEO of Dejan SEO, gave a detailed answer about the differences between a) the types of LLM crawlers and b) the different LLMs and how they behave.

Image Credit: Kevin Indig

Lily Grozeva, head of SEO at Verto Digital, rightfully called out that we can all get the answer in our own logfiles.

Image Credit: Kevin Indig

Chee Lo, head of SEO at Trustpilot, shared his experience with Perplexity, which seems to be a bit more aggressive than other bots.

Image Credit: Kevin Indig

Sites with clear internal linking patterns that mirror how humans connect concepts are (in theory, more data will tell over time) better positioned to be included in AI-generated answers and entity-rich snippets.

Way back in 2019, I explained the following in Semantic content optimization with entities:

Entities are semantic, interconnected objects that help machines to understand explicit and implicit language. In simpler terms, they are words (nouns) that represent any type of object, concept, or subject … According to Cindy Krum and her fantastic entity series, Google seems to restructure its whole approach to indexing based on entities (while you’re at it, read AJ Kohn’s article about embeddings). Understanding entities and how Google uses them in search sharpens our standards for content creation, optimization, and the use of schema markup.

Entities are nouns like events, ideas, people, places, etc. They’re the building blocks of ideas and how those ideas relate to each other. (They’re not just “keywords.”)

Search engines and LLMS use semantic relationships between entities to (1) reduce ambiguity, (2) reinforce authority/canonical sources on your site, and (3) map out relationships between topics, features, services, and audiences across your site.

When you internally link pages together with strategically descriptive anchors, you’re telling search engines how your site fits together … and you’re training them on how entities across your site connect.

Therefore, by practicing internal linking through an entity-based lens, you’re creating stronger, clearer relationships and patterns for Google/search engines/LLMs to understand.

Entity-first SEO starts with defining the people, products, concepts, and places your brand “owns.”

If you’re a B2B SaaS company offering a CRM, those entities might include your:

• Core product (CRM platform).
• Features (pipeline management, email automation, reporting dashboards).
• Use cases (sales enablement, customer support, marketing teams).
• Personas/target ICPs (heads of sales at mid-market companies, startup founders scaling revenue teams, or enterprise IT buyers).

Taking this example, you’re going to think in terms of topic-first SEO:

• Hub or pillar pages = parent entities. These are your central nodes – the definitive resource on a core concept. For a B2B SaaS CRM, it might be the CRM platform overview page.
• Cluster pages = sub-entities. These are the supporting nodes that expand on the hub. For a CRM, the CRM hub branches into feature pages like pipeline management, email automation, and reporting dashboards.
• Cross-link clusters to show relatedness. Don’t just point everything back to the hub – connect the clusters to each other to model real-world relationships. In the instance of the CRM, pipeline management integrates with email automation to shorten deal cycles.
• Navigation and breadcrumbs reinforce hierarchy. The visible structure tells both users and Google how entities fit together. Example: Home → Products → CRM → Pipeline Management.
• Include personas in the implementation. This reinforces the relationship: This persona → has this pain point → solved by this feature → within this product topic.

For example, look at this topic cluster map created with Screaming Frog:

Image Credit: Kevin Indig

It shows two clusters with nodes very close together (red and orange) and three other clusters that are spread apart (green, blue, and purple). Guess which clusters outperform the others in organic search? Red and orange!

Here’s how you connect those entities into a meaningful structure in the copy on the page:

1. Anchor text = entity disambiguation.

Instead of linking with vague text, use descriptive anchors that clarify which entity the link refers to. For example, if your CRM has a feature page about pipeline management, link to it with “sales pipeline management CRM feature” language.

2. Consistency matters.

If you always link to that pipeline management page with variations like “pipeline automation tool,” “deal tracking software,” and “CRM feature,” you dilute the entity connection. (But variations like “pipeline management tool,” “sales pipeline management CRM feature,” and “pipeline management features” are derivatives.)

By sticking to clear, consistent anchors, you signal to Google that this is the page that defines “pipeline management” for your brand.

3. Context strengthens meaning.

The sentence or paragraph around the link can add semantic weight. For example:

“Our CRM includes pipeline management, so your sales team can track every deal from prospecting to close.”

That tells Google (and users) that pipeline management isn’t just a phrase; it’s a core feature within the CRM product.

4. Include personas.

Making personas a criterion for internal linking is a no-brainer, because from a psychological perspective, a link automatically signals “there’s more for you here.”

If your internal link is placed on the right word that triggers a response in your target ICPs (and the right areas of the page), it increases the chance of people staying on the site. It’s also just a better experience – and good customer service – to help site visitors find the right offering specifically for themselves, all with the goal to increase trust and the chances they take an action or convert.

If one of your ICPs is head of Sales at mid-market SaaS companies, you might internally link from a blog article like “10 Ways SaaS Sales Leaders Can Shorten Their Sales Cycle” directly to your pipeline management feature page, while using copy surrounding that link that explains how your offering solves this problem. That link makes the relationship explicit: This is the feature that solves this persona’s pain point.

Ultimately, think of every internal link as a connector in your brand’s knowledge graph.

Together, these links show how entities and topics (like CRM platform → pipeline management → sales enablement → head of sales persona) relate to each other, and why your site is authoritative on them.

Amanda Johnson jumping in here to add: Basically, show + tell people (and search engines/LLMs) what you want them to know via literal semantics. It really is that simple. No need to overthink this. Use clear, descriptive, accurate anchor text for the internally linked page, use it consistently, and give context as to how/why the page is linked there with surrounding copy.

Ultimately, if you practice internal linking thoughtfully and methodically, you end up with a better user experience and more thorough reinforcement of internal entity relationships (which can improve topical authority signals).

Worried that your most important pages aren’t getting enough visibility because you haven’t set up a clear linking structure? Following the guidance above will help you resolve this and set up a clear internal linking system.

And using tools that have internal link auditing (like Semrush, Ahrefs, Clearscope, Surfer, etc.) will help you implement your system. Some SEO tools also give page-level internal linking recommendations and copy suggestions to anchor the text to.

Internal linking hasn’t just been about crawlability for some time now.

By structuring links around topics, entities, (and even user journeys of your target personas), you communicate your site’s semantic map to Google and LLMs.

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

How to Earn Backlinks as a Quoted Expert

Backlinks remain essential for organic search visibility, yet link-building opportunities are increasingly rare. Most tactics are either risky or ineffective. Those that work well — digital public relations, direct outreach — are often too expensive or time-consuming for small and medium-sized businesses.

But one link-building method is both inexpensive and effective: being quoted in online publications as an expert. This method produces backlinks and builds topical authority.

The tactic is “entity-driven” because it helps the quoted expert become an “entity,” i.e., a brand. Traditionally, the tactic involved laborious manual outreach to editors and writers offering expertise for articles.

There are now platforms to simplify the process. All connect publications with experts. None promote paid links or placements as far as I know.

Here are three options.

Featured

Featured is a freemium platform listing requests from publications seeking expertise. Any account holder can submit quotes in response. Account holders can be either publications or individuals, allowing them to request and submit quotes from a single account.

To be cited and linked:

• Submit your expert quotes to the requests.
• Suggest relevant questions based on your expertise, assisting publications with ideas.
• Respond to publications seeking writers.
• Create a profile to attract publications looking for interviews.

When submitting a quote, provide your attribution to help ensure a proper citation.

Account holders can submit up to three quotes for free each month. Premium packages start at $19 per month for 10 quotes.

Featured recently acquired HARO (Help A Reporter Out), an established and robust database of publications and reporters seeking experts.

Featured allows account holders to complete a profile and submit three responses per month for free. Click image to enlarge.

Source of Sources

HARO’s founder has launched Source of Sources to connect journalists with experts. It’s a newsletter listing categorized requests for quotes. The format is easy to scan and click requests to determine the topic and need.

Source of Sources is free, but it requires manual monitoring of requests. There is no dashboard to track submitted quotes, statuses, and deadlines.

Sources of Sources is a newsletter listing categorized requests from journalists for quotes. Click image to enlarge.

Journo.com

Journo.com is a freemium platform connecting reporters with expert sources. Reporters can submit quote requests without creating an account.

Experts require an account, which is free for 20 monthly responses and a dashboard to submit and monitor those responses. Paid plans start at $99 per month for 100 responses and 200 News Searches — a tool to find relevant outlets for PR campaigns.

Journo.com’s free plan allows experts to respond to 20 quote requests per month via a dashboard. Click image to enlarge.

Advanced Link Building Strategies For National, International & Local via @sejournal, @rollerblader

Advanced link building is about attracting links to your sites, and ideally in mass.

There might be a little bit of outreach necessary, especially if you need to fan the flames, but the main goal is to get media outlets, niche websites, industry publications, and bloggers to link to you naturally.

With a bit of creativity, strategic marketing, and a hands-on approach, this can be achieved.

Below, you’ll find some of the methods we’ve recommended and tested, but with variations to maintain client confidentiality.

These strategies can be modified for just about any niche or industry, and can work effectively for publishers, ecommerce, service providers/lead gen, and apps.

It is all about proper execution. If you take shortcuts or use templates and mass emails, you’ll likely not succeed.

But before diving in, here are the things we do not recommend to clients. These either fail to deliver results or work until you get caught and then you get penalized if you cannot offset them with good links.

• Guest posting for backlinks (absolutely okay for PR and customer acquisition).
• Scholarships and grants.
• Forum commenting.
• Social media profiles.
• Parasite SEO, where you give yourself backlinks.
  • Instead, you can do this to rank the site for phrases, but the pages won’t pass authority. They can send you traffic, though.
• PBNs, Link Farms, Webrings, Link Rings, Roundups.
• Link exchanges or reciprocal links (with some exceptions).
• Paying for high DA sites that also link to “Payday, Porn, Pills, Poker” niches.

Hire Someone Or Offer Services For Publicity

Think about something your audience needs or loves directly related to your products or services.

Or, think about something your audience needs a solution for that you and your staff can provide.

One example of this can be a travel company that pays people to travel the world and blog about it (I share non-travel ideas afterward).

Yes, they get content for their sites, but the value of the copy diminishes once the person’s trip ends.

If the traveler builds a following and the following reads your blog, they might leave when the person does, especially if the next author cannot connect with them.

So, why use this as a link building strategy?

It plays into people’s aspirations and emotions. When you tap into emotions like laughter, anger, jealousy, ambition, empathy, sympathy, etc., you inspire action.

People dream of traveling the world. A chance to get paid to do it for simply writing about your journey – sign them up!

Bloggers, media companies, and others are likely to write about it and link to the campaign, but you need to do the work of getting the word out. Here’s how:

• Email and SMS your customers to let them know about the opportunity.
• Run social media ads to the public using interests and demographics for targeting.
• Add a specific ad group for people who work in the media and contribute to get your content in front of the right eyes.
• Sponsor a booth at a tradeshow for the industry where you advertise your service and the job opportunity. In this case, it could be TBEX, which is for travel bloggers, and Taste Maker, for food bloggers.
• List it on the job boards and see if it gains interest and shares.

Once you find a platform that generates buzz, keep pushing it as you’re looking for the virality.

There is one catch: You will need to do more link building later, as this is a one-time acquisition campaign.

The good news: You can learn from this campaign and apply it to new ideas and strategies to keep the links coming in.

Now, let’s tweak this campaign for a local strategy while keeping the same theme.

Hosting Offline Events For Local SEO Backlinks

On my blog and at conferences, for people needing natural local backlinks, I’ve shared strategies for local businesses to host educational events or provide spaces.

The goal here is to keep something ongoing – whether weekly, monthly, or quarterly – so the existing links remain in place and new ones can develop.

It works for all types of local businesses, from retail stores and medspas to religious institutions and storage facilities.

Here are some examples:

Example 1: Medical practices can host a weekly or monthly closed event to teach parents and children how to administer injections for diabetes or allergy shots in emergencies, like anaphylactic shock.

It can also be community center volunteers who learn how to administer Narcan for overdoses and detect specific types of overdoses to apply the correct treatment.

Example 2: Anyone with space and a slow night each week can host meetups and groups like group therapy or Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), knitting or crafting circles for widows or people who just moved to the area and are lonely, or a safe space for studying after school when parents have to work.

Doing something good for a community or group with a need is rewarding on its own. As a bonus, it can be a media-worthy pitch when they need a feel-good story for PR.

Example 3: Organize pop-up events, including animal adoptions, local designers, crafters, or bakers, to display for a day or a week.

By hosting a new pop-up, even if it is the same repeating theme, your business becomes a go-to resource for community engagement.

These complementary brands send social media signals and traffic to your store, bring in new customers as they announce the pop-up, and get citations as people want to know how they can grow or discover new things in their cities.

Slow nights and extra space provide the perfect opportunity to get backlinks.

Once your event gains traction, you can reach out to other companies and non-profits whose audiences would benefit.

In the medical example above, reach out to pediatricians’ and physicians’ offices. For community meetings, collaborate with religious institutions or government websites that link to local community resources or schools for the same reasons.

Sponsorships

You should not buy sponsorships solely for backlinks, but backlinks can result from being a sponsor.

The goal is to create something media-worthy at the event, or an initiative that inspires people to mention your company over others.

This works for niche companies that can be local, national, or international, such as SEO tool providers and SaaS solutions.

It also works for mining and lumber companies or local restaurants and chains. For marketing agencies, performers like singers and actors, and even a veterinary practice.

Here are some examples:

Example 1: Every city has dog meetups or races. Here in DC, we have the annual Chihuahua races around Cinco de Mayo and the Drag Queen High Heel race around Halloween.

For the dog races or meetups, sponsor a couple of the pooches and dress them in costumes with your URL on them. Everyone loves a puppy in costume, and that URL makes its way around the images.

Same with sponsoring a drag queen. Give her a sash or title featuring your company name and/or URL. Take it a step further by sponsoring a drag queen at other events for photo ops, like a drag race, an eating competition, or something unexpected (as long as she is safe).

Example 2: Conferences have media companies, bloggers, and coverage like crazy. Think about your booth and the PR stunts you can do within your industry.

Some booths bring in celebrities, and everyone wants to take their photo with them. These booths also get mentioned in the conference roundups and you can ask for backlinks.

Other times, it’s being creative, like creating an arcade, setting up a beauty salon, or doing IV hydration drips.

The added bonus to the beauty salon and IV drip (I’ve seen this at shows, and it was awesome) is that you get a captive audience of potential customers.

Being Listed As A Service Provider

This applies mostly to brick-and-mortar businesses, but may work for some ecommerce sites and service providers as well.

Think about what your customers and potential users do, and where you fit into their lives.

For example, if you’re a restaurant in a city, you want locals, business people, and tourists. So, citation links are already on your radar, but what about usage and recommended service provider links?

I live in Washington, DC. If I’m planning on going to the theatre, I’ll probably want drinks or dinner beforehand.

If I’m from out of town and in DC to see a show, I’ll probably want a hotel nearby.

This is where you can get a lot of solid backlinks. Type “restaurants near National Theater,” “hotels near arena stage,” or “places for drinks near Kennedy Center.”

Each of these queries brings up the theater’s own website, things to do in DC results, and some directories.

These are easy backlinks to get and can bring customers through your door. Double bonus. It’s the exact type of link that can help grow your business.

Now, look for convention centers, conferences, annual pop culture events, and other things happening in your city or nationally.

There will be fan sites, reviews, guides on what to do, trade publications, and associations that all provide resources around these.

By getting on their radar, you can get backlinks from them, with potential customers spending money on your products and services.

Final Thoughts

The ultimate goal of advanced link building is to bring links to your site organically, minimizing the need for manual outreach while acquiring more quality links at scale.

The techniques outlined above tend to have a snowball effect when done well, or build enough authority that you become a recognized brand and entity related to your products and services.

Once this happens, your rankings begin to stabilize, and you should find that you attract more links naturally.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Vasin Lee/Shutterstock

Is Your Site Vulnerable to a Google Update?

Google has periodically updated its core algorithm for several years now. Unlike the Panda and Penguin updates a decade ago, core updates have no defined recovery tactics, at least Google will not reveal them.

No site is safe from a Google update; ranking fluctuations are normal. Current Google search guidelines are vague and subjective — “helpful content” and “better usability” are hard to define and do not translate into an actionable strategy.

Yet some sites are impacted more than others. I’ve seen sites that went from thousands of clicks per day to 10.

I’ve analyzed hundreds of sites and their histories with Google updates. Here’s what makes sites the most vulnerable.

Dependence on a Few Pages

Losing traffic is probable if your site relies on two or three pages ranking for high-search-volume keywords,

Diversifying your ranking profile with long-tail keywords is critical. Long-tail queries send fewer clicks, but losing rankings on a few won’t materially impact your overall search visibility.

To achieve this:

• Don’t limit your strategy to high-search-volume keywords. In my tests, popular SEO platforms detect only about a third of ranking keywords.

• Create content based on what your followers, readers, and customers discuss — not keywords. Focusing on keywords for editorial decisions leads to fragile ranking profiles.

• Create descriptive, longer titles, especially for product pages. It will help rank for longer-tail queries.

Stale or Weak Backlink Profile

According to Google’s leaked algorithm documentation, “the freshness” of a link is a huge factor. SEO practitioners have long known that a site cannot maintain rankings without acquiring fresh backlinks.

Sites impacted by last year’s “helpful content” updates had weaker backlink profiles than those that maintained or increased rankings, even with similar themes and content quality.

Certainly content, site speed, and clicks and user experience are key ranking factors. But strong backlink profiles appear to be paramount.

Few or No Brand Signals

I explained last year how to tell if Google recognizes a site as a brand. I always check branding when analyzing sites with big traffic losses. In most cases, an impacted site does not appear to be an entity.

Becoming a recognizable brand is not easy. It takes a lot of time, but it is essential for consistent search visibility. Here are a few strategies for small and midsize businesses.

• Collaborate with other brands and nonprofits, especially if Google recognizes them as brands. Being associated with entities is the most powerful way to become one.

• Get nominated for industry awards or speak at conferences — anything to associate with other entities is helpful.

• Invest in viral marketing and social media ads. Both increase branded search, which is a huge signal to Google.