You often see on product pages or even blog posts, a section for related products or related stories. What if those related links were so dynamic that every time the page load, it loaded a new set of links? Is that bad for Google and your SEO efforts?

John Mueller from Google said on Twitter it “wouldn’t be terrible” if the links changed all the time. He said it isn’t common to see sites set up like that, but if they do change all the time, that isn’t going to be “terrible” from an SEO perspective. The links will still give Google context around that product or page.

John said “From an SEO point of view, these links give more context (“these pages are related / similar”) and they make it easier to crawl the website. Usually they don’t change all the time, but that wouldn’t be terrible (just makes tracking/debugging harder).”

The question:

@JohnMu We link related recipes from within the page and thought having a dynamic related posts at the bottom is a bad idea as it may change every time. But looks like you seem to say otherwise that it is perfectly fine to have the dynamic related pages that may help Google 1/2

— Veg Vegan Meat (@VegVeganMeat) September 18, 2021

John replied:

From an SEO point of view, these links give more context (“these pages are related / similar”) and they make it easier to crawl the website. Usually they don’t change all the time, but that wouldn’t be terrible (just makes tracking/debugging harder).

— 🧀 John 🧀 (@JohnMu) September 19, 2021

The video referenced is at the 56:48 mark where the question was “linking by relevance in a dynamic way on on menus is kind of the SEO question I was trying to get at.” John responded “I think that’s also pretty common, so a lot of the blogs have that set up where you have related posts linked on the bottom essentially. And that’s essentially the same direction that you’re talking about where whatever on the back end is recognizing these are some keywords in the current blog post we have similar keywords and other blog posts I’ll link to them. And that works well for the user and it also gives more context for Google when it crawls the web pages so i think that’s kind of a good approach.”

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Here is a bit more:

It’s more about the overall picture & context. There’s no magical ranking boost from just having more internal links on a page.

— 🧀 John 🧀 (@JohnMu) September 19, 2021

Note: This was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today, I am currently offline for Succos.