Tracking Effects of Internal Linking

[RishadShaikh59]

Can anyone suggest the best way to track the effectiveness of internal linking on a website?

Thanks!

[gmellak]

Another way might be to do google

site:yourdomain.com

to check which page of your site has the most authority for a given keyword. If you're running a car site, www.mycarsite.com bmw should return the URL google considers most important for BMW as the first result.

[RishadShaikh59]

Hey, thanks for your answer...I actually managed to figure this out before reading your question and was cursing myself for being such a dumbo! Can't believe this didn't come to me before...thanks for you support anyways!

Cheers!

[Miranda.Rensch]

Ah, I see. You could try Google's In-Page Analytics. It's in beta right now, but its pretty interesting. You can see the % and number of clicks that go to all* the links from a particular page. Here are a couple screenshot examples: http://i.imgur.com/N7eZh.png and http://i.imgur.com/N7eZh.png

So, you should be able to go to the news organization site and see the breakdown of which links get the most clicks. Of course, you'll have to have access to the analytics account to that site and have it set up.

One strange thing to watch out for - if you have more than one link on that page going to the same URL, it will count the clicks all together making it look like one of the links got all the clicks and the other got zero.

Hope that helps!

[RishadShaikh59]

Thanks for your answer. Basically, what I'm looking for is to see how many people actually click on the internal links posted in the body of an article. To be more precise, I'm talking about a news organization that provides links to other relevant stories based not on page authority but on the "value" that the link provides to the user. In this case, I wouldn't be too concerned about the page authority. Rather I want to check how many people clicked through to the internal links. I hope thats clear!

[Miranda.Rensch]

Are wanting to track effectiveness as in determining if the crawler reaches all of your pages? Or effective in improving domain authority?

If you're trying to figure out if your internal linking is improving your domain authority, you could compare the number of followed internal links against your domain authority over time, but obviously there are many other factors that might be contributing to your domain authority.

So, your might consider analyzing on a more detailed level and asking yourself - is linking to a specific page with an internal link increasing the page authority of that page?

Our next version of OSE will provide some custom report options which should allow you to see the % of MozRank that comes from internal links. Meanwhile, you could choose pages to target and analyze their page authority before and after you add some new internal links to those pages. Using OSE, you can enter the targeted page, download a list of internal URLs, add some more internal links and see if your page authority goes up.

Does anyone else know of a tool to more easily analyze this?