We already do a great job with internal linking on the Ahrefs blog. But we wondered if adding a related posts section would help us and if users would use it.
Our marketing team was pretty divided on whether we should have a section like this and whether it would help. I’ve personally had great results with this on sites with a lot of content, and I was convinced it would help the Ahrefs blog.
In December 2022, we added a “Continue Learning” section to the bottom of posts using a popular related posts plugin for WordPress. Here’s what it looks like:
When I looked back to check what had happened, the results were okay, but nothing spectacular. Overall we noticed a slight increase, but based on the trend I couldn’t conclude that it had anything to do with internal linking.
Two algorithm updates were implemented during the time we added related posts: a helpful content update and a spam links update. This made the test data confusing, but we decided to leave it for a while anyway.
After a few months, the topic of removing related posts from the site came up. Some people just didn’t want it, while others didn’t think it had much of an impact. I didn’t object because I was curious to see what would happen.
When we removed it, we saw some loss of traffic on many pages. This time, the trend indicated that it was related to internal links that had been removed.
While we waited until after a major update to remove related posts, Google rolled out another helpful content update soon after removing them. Again, the data from this test was a bit confusing.
I waited a few months and this time I checked our analytics and noticed that when we had the related posts section, people spent more time on the site and viewed more pages. Users were actually clicking on these related posts!
We have decided to add it again, but only on the English pages. We wanted to improve the quality of the match before adding it back to other languages.
This created a nice split test because we could now see the difference between how English pages were affected compared to pages in other languages.
Things seemed to be going well. We saw more traffic and it seemed somewhat related to pages that had more internal links.
This time we didn’t have any updates, so we did a real test with a control group. The results for English blog posts were positive.
The results for non-English blog posts were a bit mixed, but we had a lot of posts here that lost traffic.
I decided to go back even further, from when we removed the related posts section to today (about a month and a half after we added the English blogs section again).
English blogs this time showed a strong correlation. It definitely seemed like having the internal links helped with their traffic.
The non-English blogs were pretty mixed, but there were a lot of losers and not as strong a correlation.
The results speak for themselves and are exactly what I expected to see. We’ve seen some lift from having these additional internal links in the related posts section, but not much of an impact since we already link well internally.
My best guess as to why we see some impact is that often related links are pieces of content that we wouldn’t naturally link to from blog content.
On blogs that aren’t as optimized as ours for internal linking but have a lot of content, I would expect to see an even greater impact.
That’s all for now. We will probably add posts related to non-English posts again at some point this year. I’ll update the article with what happens when we do this, but I would expect a small increase for the content.
For more ideas on how to get internal links, read Internal Linking for SEO: A Practical Guide.
If you have any questions, send me a message X.