Anchor text, internal links, external links, link rels, and the cleanup work that turns a tangled site into a coherent one. Practical playbooks for the link architecture work that compounds rankings.
Anchor text is one of the few signals on the web where MORE optimization actively hurts you - and where the right distribution looks "less optimized" than the patterns most SEO guides recommend. A practical playbook for the natural-distribution rule, when exact-match anchors are a liability, and how to audit your inbound anchor profile for over-optimization patterns Google penalizes.
Internal linking is the only ranking lever you have 100% control over - and the only one most teams ignore. A practical playbook for the hub-and-spoke architecture, the orphan-page audit, the PageRank-flow workflow, and the deep-page link-injection move that lifts long-tail rankings without acquiring a single new backlink.
External links to other sites are the most argued-about move in SEO - half the internet says "never link out, you leak PageRank," the other half says "link out generously, Google rewards it." A practical playbook for the topic-relevance argument, the leak-vs-credibility tradeoff, and the audit move for spotting toxic-neighborhood outbound links that quietly drag your rankings down.
In 2019 Google flipped nofollow from a directive ("never follow this") to a hint ("we will consider this"). Most sites are still emitting blanket nofollow on every outbound link as if it were 2010 - which now wastes the credibility signal authoritative outbound links can give. A practical playbook for the four rel values (none, nofollow, sponsored, ugc), the decision tree per link type, and the migration audit for legacy templates that need cleaning up.
Broken links are silent equity loss - every internal 404 is wasted PageRank flow, every broken external link is a dead-end credibility cost. A practical playbook for the four sources of broken links on real sites, the bulk-fix workflow that scales beyond hand-fixing one link at a time, and the broken-backlink reclamation move that recovers equity from inbound links pointing at URLs that no longer exist.