Contextual links simply put are links within a paragraph of text that link to an authority on the subject.

For example if we were referring to the Google Algorithm we’d insert a contextual link citing the original Stanford paper written by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.

Linking out to contextually relevant sites is important especially when citing research or stats. It provides credibility to your content.

Contextual links isn’t just about linking out, gaining contextual links from third party sites is extremely valuable from an SEO perspective.

For example if you are a recruitment agency and you release a salary insights on cyber security jobs, you’ll find that other sites will pick that up and link to you citing you as the source of the statistic.

If you are the authority on a subject-matter, then people will naturally link to you.

Firstly, bit of backgound on the nofollow attribute:

In 2005 the search engines huddled together in a dark room (we have a wild imagination) and created the “nofollow” attribute. This attribute was created to fight comment spam.

The nofollow attribute is added to a link to tell search engines not to pass any value/credit to that link. Here is an example of how its instrumented:

<a href="https://somewebsite.com" rel="nofollow">Buy Nike Air Jordans</a>

At that time forums, comments, user profiles were full of spam with automated tools such as Scrapebox being used to build links through comment spam. 

The search engines responded by implementing the nofollow attribute. Webmasters then begain enabling the nofollow attribute to any user generated content (i.e. comments/forum posts/user profiles/bios). This meant that any comment spam wouldn’t pass any link equity/credit and this strategy of black hat SEO was stopped in its tracks. 

Not only was this spam impacting Search Engines link graphs, it was really annoying for site owners (and us!). 

The dofollow is the opposite, and this is assumed and it isn’t necessary to specify that a link is dofollow. 

This has many names, including hub/spoke (our favourite) and Cluster/Hub. It describes the organise of content around a single topic/theme within a separate silo from the rest of the site. 

Essentially its the practice of having a single page (hub) with multiple internal pages linking to this page (spoke).

The idea behind this strategy is to provide internal contextually relevant links to your own hub page. This would make it the authority within your site.  

For example on our site, the SEO page is our “hub” and if we write content related to SEO we’ll link to this page from our spoke pages (which is our case may be services under SEO or blog posts).

In short, Click Depth is the number of clicks from the homepage before the user arrives on another page. 

Click Depth is very important from a search engine optimisation perspetive. If you have a large ecommerce site, and your product pages are 4-5 clicks from the homepage, from a search engines perspective, your product pages are not as important as they are lower down your sites architecture. 

Here is what Google’s John Mueller said on the subject:

Click Depth/Page Depth are interchangeable and essentially describe the same thing, but different nomenclature. 

Anchor text is the text contained within the link to your website.

<a href="https://bravr.com">This is the anchor text</a>

The contents of the anchor text suggest to search engines what your website is about.

Firstly to explain the difference, a sub-domain is a child of your parent domain e.g.
https://support.yourdomain.com

A sub-folder is where it appears after your domain name e.g.

https://yourdomain.com/support/

Normally we recommend sub-folders over sub-domains.  Sub-domains do not inherit domain authority from the parent domain and seen as separate sites in SEO.

So if you were writing a blog, and decided to use the URL
https://blog.yourdomain.com

That would be seen as a separate site from an SEO perspective, and wouldn’t inherit domain authority from yourdomain.com

However:
https://yourdomain.com/blog/ 

That would inherit authority from your main domain.

Where SEO isn’t important e.g.a support ticket system, webmail, or internal logins then we can use a sub-domain otherwise we’d recommend using a sub-folder.