š This article provides an overview of SmartLink, part of Botify's Activation Suite, available as an option with all Botify plans.
Introduction
Internal links are essential for discoverability and ranking. They help users and bots navigate your websiteās pages, discover new ones, and understand its structure and hierarchy. They also signal the importance and value of pages to search engines. Creating an intelligent linking structure across websites is a challenging task. With SmartLink, Botify combines SEO expertise with extensive data to help websites optimize their internal linking to drive traffic and revenue.
SmartLink evaluates robot and user behavior against an analysis of your siteās structure to develop an optimized, intelligent linking strategy that maximizes chances for bots to discover all your content and for your key pages to drive traffic. The output is new links you can implement on your web pages through Botify or on your own. This primarily benefits e-commerce websites with large catalogs and limited engineering resources.
š SmartLink provides the following benefits through its high-value internal links:
Optimize pages to boost SEO metrics and drive revenue & website visits.
Discover opportunities to bring new traffic.
Give control to align with changing seasons and trends.
Improve your crawl budget catalog discovery.
Who is SmartLink For?
SmartLink is primarily for e-commerce websites, especially those with linking structures that are insufficient to drive organic traffic for the following page types:
Product Detail Pages (PDPs): Increase your PDPs' visibility to search engines. SmartLink ensures PDPs are easily accessible from the home page within a few clicks while optimizing a group of PDPs to rank well for a broad range of keywords.
Product Listing Pages (PLPs): SmartLink provides the same increased visibility for PLPs as PDPs and emphasizes PLPs with high potential to boost their average position.
Requirements
In addition to providing your configuration preferences, SmartLink requires the following data sources to be integrated with your Botify project:
Google Search Console: Keyword sampling must be >90% of impressions and
>97% of clicks, as shown in the RealKeywords Keywords Sampling section. Because of this requirement, we strongly recommend having the GSC Bulk Data Export Integration.CDN or web server logs: SmartLink requires at least 90 days of log data integrated with your Botify project.
Visits and revenue: SmartLink requires complete page view data and associated revenue from all channels, including your thirty-party analytics (Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, or Piano Analytics).
Classifying pages: SmartLink relies on page qualifiers in your project segmentation to determine which pages are detail pages and which are the first pages in pagination (i.e., P1).
Installing a JavaScript snippet: If you choose to have Botify deploy the links for you, it will require you to install Botify's JavaScript snippet on your site pages. This is not required if you choose to deploy the links on your own.
How it Works
Botify takes a holistic approach to understanding every aspect of your website. By leveraging user behavior data, server logs, and SEO performance data with your custom parameters for building links, SmartLink uses data science and automation to generate link recommendations.
The process of generating and implementing links with SmartLink includes the following steps:
āļø The following describes the base-level SmartLink offering. Contact your SEO Success Manager for additional customization options with the Enterprise plan.
Botify analyzes your website
Our analysis starts with ingesting data from your web server log and third-party analytics. We then run a full crawl to build an internal link graph, collect performance metrics, and identify similar pages. We combine the crawl data with our bot and user behavior analysis to generate link recommendations. Read about all data collected in Botify crawls.
Defining your preferences
You can tailor the following parameters and assess SmartLinkās impact before implementing it on a large scale:
Use Botify filters to identify the categories or templates that precisely define the scope of URLs to optimize, ensuring your efforts are focused on your most strategic pages. The scope can be URLs or specific keywords to prioritize.
Define the maximum number of links to add to source and destination pages.
Generating links
SmartLink identifies source and destination URLs based on your defined preferences and data from crawls, logs, Google Search Console, and third-party analytics. Only indexable pages crawled by Botify that return a 200 HTTP status code are eligible to be source or destination pages.
Determining source pages
Source pages are the pages that will link to destination pages. SmartLink identifies the detail pages to be boosted by evaluating the pages you have qualified in your project segmentation. Pages that Google hasnāt crawled in the last 90 days are not considered.
Determining destination pages
Destination pages are the pages that will receive the new links from the source pages. SmartLink can determine the destination pages to boost by evaluating the pages you have qualified in your project segmentation that have an insufficient number of links. You can filter this scope using any Botify filter. Alternatively, you can define the destination pages by uploading a comma-separated values (CSV) file.
Matching pages
SmartLink matches source and destination pages by determining if they are related, including whether they have the same host and language. Using page titles and AI, SmartLink groups pages with similar topics and then prioritizes them as follows:
Source pages: Pages with the highest quality are considered first (e.g., those crawled by Google frequently and ranking).
Destination pages: Pages receiving the lowest number of clicks are considered first.
SmartLink generates as many links as possible within the constraints you define for the highest potential source and destination matches. The generated links anchor texts are derived from the destination pages' H1 tag.
Validating Results
Once SmartLink has identified the linking opportunities, Botify provides:
A list of URLs and their anchors for your review.
An analysis to help you understand the effects of incorporating these links into your website structure, showing the projected evolution of key SEO metrics.
Deploying Links
After validating the link recommendations, you can implement the links on your website using one of two methods:
Add a Botify JavaScript tag to your site to add the links seamlessly. If you use SpeedWorkers, the links will be shown to bots through SpeedWorkers directly and the JavaScript tag will show them to users.
Add the links independently using an exported file with the recommended links.
Measuring Results
Easily track your organic traffic evolution with Botify's post-launch reports of sitewide metrics. While it will take a few days to weeks for search engine bots to crawl and index the updated internal links, you can use the following reports in Botify to evaluate the immediate impact after launching SmartLink:
Optimization success rate (if deployed through PageWorkers)
% of destinations that are indexable (should be at or close to 100%)
š While a solid linking strategy is essential to your siteās health, improving internal linking will not solve all your SEO issues. You may need to resolve other factors impacting your siteās SEO first, such as a crawl budget issue (e.g., Google is crawling randomly your website).
FAQs
Can I see the recommended links before implementing them?
Can I see the recommended links before implementing them?
Yes, you have total control over all recommended links. SmartLink will generate a pre-launch report that demonstrates the potential impact of implementing these links.
What if I want to create links from source to destination only in the same language?
What if I want to create links from source to destination only in the same language?
We define constraints to configure specific fields requiring the same value for source and destination.
How does SmartLink determine anchor text?
How does SmartLink determine anchor text?
Anchor text relies on dimensions extracted during the crawl, with H1 tags being used by default, and Title tags if no H1 tag is found. If you have an Enterprise plan, we can define a template based on extracted dimensions, such as product name.
Our CMS handles internal linking. How is SmartLink better?
Our CMS handles internal linking. How is SmartLink better?
Automated linking, driven by your CMS, typically connects pages in a standard hierarchical fashion. Some websites aim to expand internal linking beyond the typical structure; however, a smart linking strategy requires a significant amount of data, intelligence, and automation. For e-commerce websites with extensive product catalogs, identifying and implementing an optimized link structure can be a complex challenge, as it requires in-depth knowledge of the websiteās structure and the effective use of machine learning. SmartLink generates the right links for your business based on your preferences, the extensive site data we have collected in your Botify project, and our data-science-backed methodology.
How does this solution differ from exporting internal linking ideas from Site Crawler?
How does this solution differ from exporting internal linking ideas from Site Crawler?
SiteCrawler cannot tell you which links to include and where. It will provide you with data on your existing linking structure, such as the number of links you have and to which pages, allowing you to understand the problem (e.g., 1 inlink to 30% of your product pages) but not instructing you on how to fix it. SmartLink does this automatically.
Is there a risk of cloaking issues if we apply link optimizations that only appear when search engines crawl our site?
Is there a risk of cloaking issues if we apply link optimizations that only appear when search engines crawl our site?
We recommend making all links visible to bots and users.
How do we deploy to a QA version of our website?
How do we deploy to a QA version of our website?
This should be easy to do for the QA version of your site if you are implementing the links yourself. Deploying with PageWorkers provides a built-in preview capability to help you visualize the effect of optimizations before they are deployed. Additionally, the dashboard allows you to control when optimizations are deployed or removed with a single click.
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