Lessons Learned from Pinterest Traffic-based Interlinking Experiments for SEO
https://medium.comCheck out this SEO experiment for internal links from Pinterest. The post breaks down their testing methodologies and how they calculate success for these tests. They test three hypothesis
- A page linked from an internal link would have more traffic than if the page was not linked.
- Traffic increase from linking a new page should be larger than the traffic lost from unlinking an old page.
- Assuming that your new interlinking algorithm assigns scores to destination pages, linking to a page with a higher score should have a higher gain than linking to a page with a lower score.
What did they learn?
- Pick the existing winners. If we are looking for maximum SEO sessions, picking destination pages that already do well in search results (thus driving good SEO traffic sessions) actually help boost more total traffic.
- Existing SERP (search engine results pages) ranking is more sticky than you might think. As you might expect, when we point an internal link to a new page, the new page receives a boost of traffic from the search engines. We typically see this increase within 2 weeks. Surprisingly, when the internal link no longer points to an old page, the old page does not suffer much. (The metrics stay flat for 8 weeks.)
- Expect fast results. We acknowledge that the time to impact for new internal links depends heavily on the domain, crawl rate, etc. With that said, we have seen the traffic shifts start as soon as within 4 days and stabilize as fast as approximately 2 weeks.
