Ch. 8: The Internal Linking Pass That Added $400/mo

Ch. 8: The Internal Linking Pass That Added $400/mo

At 50 published articles, my home-fitness site had a linking mess — some pages had zero internal links pointing in. I ran a structured pass over one weekend.

— Exported all URLs, used a free crawler to count inbound internal links per page
— Found 11 pages with 0-1 links in. Orphans bleeding rankings
— For each money page, added 3 contextual links from my highest-traffic info posts (the ones with real link equity)
— Anchor text: exact-match for 1, partial-match for 2 — never all exact, that's a footprint
— Removed 6 links pointing at a thin page I was about to noindex anyway

Three weeks later, two money pages jumped from position 8-9 to 4-5. Revenue went $1,100 to $1,500/mo.

Lesson banked: you already paid for the link equity. Stop letting it pool on the wrong pages.