What do you need to take care while auto interlinking your posts?

In last couple of days, I shared few posts about how interlinking your posts can be good for your site. The posts I shared are –

How to interlink posts in WordPress? – Manual ways of doing it.
How to auto interlink using SEO smart links & SEO alrp plugin? – Automate the whole process using plugin.

In this post, I’m gonna share few things, which you should take care while auto interlinking your posts. You may be wondering why I’m sharing this – Its because a plugin which does it automatically can get you penalized if not used/configured properly. Read a case study here, which explains how SEO smart links can caused a penalty for a website.

What I should take care?

Excessive links from a small piece of content 

if you do not configure the plugin in a proper way, It can generate excessive number of links. Think! If you have a post of 300 words with 25 links in it. It would not be user friendly at all, same applies for search engine. In last couple of years Google has updated their algorithm to an extent, it can judge whether the content is really useful for users or not. I’m not sure what should be the maximum limit of internal links you can have from a post, however one thing is sure that do not overdo it. It would look spammy and end result would not be good.

Overuse of keywords

Both the plugins I shared in last post has a custom settings where you can specify the keywords and urls. More or less you can have a tight control over anchor texts. So what can be termed as overuse of keywords? Suppose you have written an article on cars and there are 10 occurrences of word “car” in that particular article, all words are somehow linked to a internal post (can be same or different) then it would really be annoying for users and so do for search engines. Try to avoid such kind of scenarios.

Over-optimization

I’m sure you would be aware of it. Linking a particular post using same anchor text again and again, in order to make it rank for the keyword (anchor text) could signals over optimization to search engine bots. Try to vary anchor text every time you link to the same post.

Conclusion

Auto interlinking is good until unless it is done in a ethical way. Always remember, you are writing for users so have them in mind while doing such kind of things. Moreover, if you feel that this way is not at all good then go for the manual way of doing it. Let’s us know your experience with interlinking via comments. Do share your feedback!!