1. The Experiment and the Links

Last month I performed a SEO experiment with the internal linking structure of my site. I picked one of my newer tutorials – one that wasn’t getting any traffic from Google, and I linked to it from 12 individual articles. These are relevant articles on the same topic – basically all of my articles in that particular category.

The main tutorial page is: http://www.baeldung.com/httpclient-guide

And the individual articles are all of the 12 articles on that page.

The link I used is very simple and natural:

If you want to dig deeper and learn other cool things you can do with the HttpClient – head on over to the main HttpClient tutorial.

The anchor text of the link is exactly the same for all of the 12 links I added.

2. Traffic Results

When I started the experiment, the page was already a little more than a month old – it existed and was indexed since the 21st of March – but, until the 26th of April, it was getting 2-3 visits per week, so almost no traffic.

I added the internal links in the last week of April; the result was quite obvious – the traffic spiked on the 29th to ~100 visits / week and again more recently to ~150 visits / week:

3. Conclusion

Good internal linking is a powerful technique – it’s entirely possible to get a page ranking using only these types of links as long as you have a few relevant pages with some juice behind them.

So – overall, I’d say the experiment was a quick win and a learning experience.