Please stop asking me these two questions 😵

The other day on Twitter, I received two COMPLETELY different questions to the same tweet and I thought it would be a great idea to share them with you here in this email… 

So, here are the questions:

Question 1:

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“Do you ever run an instance of WordPress apart from the blog Shopify provides?”

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I’ve had this question asked a lot to me by brands that we work with and potential prospects.

The answer is, quite simply:

No.

I have never done it and I don’t recommend anyone doing it.

The Shopify blog editors and page editors are not great; I’ll give you that.

It’s hard to make the format look good — unless you know HTML very well.

But oftentimes, we just publish text, images, and internal links.

We do have custom HTML code that we use sparingly for CTAs.

You should know this about me by now… I take a very simple, straightforward approach to SEO. 

Nothing too flashy or complicated. 

However, the reason most people want to use a WordPress blog instead of a Shopify blog is because…

It’s more customizable.

So you get to spend hours in the blog editor adding custom blocks, changing button colors, and making it look nice. 

Congratulations, you just wasted a few hours of your time.

But more importantly….

Your WordPress blog will have to live on a subdomain, separate from your Shopify store.

You’ll notice I used the word “separate” – that’s because they’re two different websites in the eyes of Google. 

Imagine your Shopify website: your-brand-name.com

Now imagine a WordPress blog for that website: blog.your-brand-name.com

The average person will look at that and say:

“Hey, it’s a subdomain… so… it’s the same website.”

But it’s not.

Google treats these as two separate websites. 

Let’s say:

You get a backlink to a blog that you published on your subdomain (blog.your-brand-name.com)

That backlink does not also count for your site (your-brand-name.com).

Sure, you can pass most of the link value to the primary domain with links.

But oftentimes, your subdomain & primary domain will have entirely different backlink profiles. 

Also… if you want to build a backlink to both, you’ll have to pay double. 

All of that just so your blog looks “nice.” 

Not at all worth it in my opinion. 

Save your time & money, put everything you have into your primary domain.

Question 2:

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“Thoughts on automating internal links (varied anchor text) if lots of blog posts/pages?”

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So far, my experience has been that automated internal linking tools are not yet good enough to build links at scale, at least not without a thorough QA process. 

However, the gentlemen who asked this question just built a Shopify app and asked me to demo it. 

I’m going to crank out a ton of AI content over the weekend and test it on a personal site, will keep you updated. It’s too early to tell, but from what I saw, it looked more promising than most.

But, back to my current stance: Why aren’t they good enough? 

The primary reason is that they don’t understand your website’s structure well enough to entrust them with your entire internal linking strategy. 

Generally speaking, you build internal links for one of a few reasons: 

• To connect users with other pages they may find relevant

• To pass PageRank (or whatever you prefer to call it) to the most important pages on your site

• Move users down the funnel

In many cases, it’s 2 or 3 of these reasons. 

In eCommerce, you build internal links: 

• From blogs to other relevant blogs

• To pass backlink “juice” from blogs to money pages

• To move users from a MoFu blog to a money page

But the fatal flaw with these tools is that they only build or suggest internal links based on page 1, page 2, and a “relevant anchor.” 

A well-known example of this is the Ahrefs internal link opportunities tool…

On several instances, it has suggested that I build an internal link from a customer review to a product page. 

It saw a “relevant” keyword and suggested that I build an internal link. 

But I can’t link from a customer review – that’s impossible. 

It’s also suggested that I build an internal link from a product page to a blog post. 

Seems alright, right? 

Wrong. 

You want users to move towards the money pages. And once they get there, you DON’T want them to move off of it or move further back up the funnel to a blog post.

Now..

I don’t think these tools are useless. 

If you own a niche site (or “media site,” whatever you’re calling it these days), these tools can be a massive help to you. 

You likely have 10x the number of blog-style pages than an eCom or SaaS website, and you need a way to help you connect the dots among all of your MoFu & ToFu blogs.

That’s why tools like Link Whisperer are so popular among niche site operators.

If you’re wondering how we manage internal linking for all of the brands that we work with… We do it manually. 

No, it’s not easy. No, it’s not fast or convenient. But nothing worth doing is, right? 

That is all for today.

Until next time,

Kai Cromwell