We never see the organizational aspect of horse racing. In fact, behind every thoroughbred, there is a vast and well-managed infrastructure. Stables are carefully regulated for ideal storage and dietary conditions. Meals are considered and weighed to the last ounce. Temperatures are optimized for the animal’s muscle health. Every detail is chosen and managed perfectly.
We should be just as diligent in how we handle our links. SEO is all about credibility in the eyes of a search engine.
A well-managed link catalog can help indicate credibility and reliability to the powers that be at Google.
Let’s get into how you can optimize your website link content appropriately.
What is Link Management?
Link management is the organization and optimization of the link structure on your website. Internally, this means linking to content throughout your website in a way that is organic and logical.
Are you connecting related materials in a way that adds to the reader’s experience, or are you simply plugging the page you want to drive attention to?
External linking, which refers to links to other websites, is equally important and requires diligence. Are the pages you link to high authority?
Do they add to the user experience? If so, they might further improve your SEO standing.
Links also require ongoing maintenance. They will eventually expire—sometimes literally, when a page is taken down, and other times figuratively, when the content is no longer accurate or timely.
Good link management may involve periodically reviewing old content, refreshing links, and updating accompanying information to ensure your articles remain relevant and useful.
Ultimately, relevancy is what Google is after. Proper link management ensures your site continues to meet those standards, signaling authority and credibility to search engines.
Why Do Search Engines Care About Link Management?
Anytime you’re working on a search engine optimization strategy, it’s important to think about how Google is able to evaluate credibility. They aren’t physically reading the content you put out; instead, they have an automated set of criteria that filters content and, at least in theory, prioritizes the best of the best.
In the context of keyword optimization, this means integrating phrases that are relevant to the thing a person is searching for, but that’s only one criterion. The article needs to be more than just about the thing—it also needs to cover it well. For that, Google often looks at links in several different ways.
For one thing, if an article has been backlinked—that’s to say, cited many different times—it suggests to the search engine that this information might be of genuinely high quality. Other people have deemed it useful, and that’s good enough for Google.
But also relevant is the quality of the research that went into the article. For that, Google looks at the link management strategy. Does this article reference high-quality content? Is the content that it’s referencing up to date? Is it internally linking to relevant support materials? Is the website content itself related in general to the topic that’s being discussed?
These are all credibility indicators that testify in their own ways to Google that the stuff you’re putting out there is good and useful to readers.
How to Manage Links
If you sit down one day and decide to update all of your links, it’s going to take seven hours, and it’s going to make you furious.
Better link management strategies involve short, periodic bursts of effort. If you set aside fifteen minutes to go through your website every week and update links, you’ll maintain good SEO hygiene and you won’t burn yourself out on a task that may feel less important than, say, writing guest posts, tracking 2025 Breeders’ Cup prep races updates or creating new pillar content.
As you go through your links, think about the context of their relevancy. For example, if you’re writing about AI or big data and the source you linked to is more than a few months old, chances are it’s not the best information out there anymore.
This is a good opportunity to not only improve upon the link, but maybe also to touch up the content a little bit—make it more useful and evergreen.
Obviously, you can’t completely rewrite every piece of content on your website every week to make sure it’s as relevant as it was the day you wrote it, but with basic maintenance, you can breathe new life into old writing and signal to the search engine that you’re serious about providing readers with high-quality, relevant information.
In SEO, it can be hard to know exactly where to direct the bulk of your attention. Google has never been very upfront about what they want to see from their content—and even if they were, it’s a standard that changes literally every single day.
The only thing that is as true today as it was on day one: Google wants good writing and high-quality information to rise to the top. That’s always been their aim. They may not always pursue that goal to perfection, but if you can meet them where they’re at and signal credibility at every turn, your content will eventually rank.
At the end of the day, it’s all about consistency. Link management done regularly is a strong indication that your content is the exact kind of quality Google wants to promote.
