I am a huge fan for automation and automating internal link building where you can is a great practice in theory. Recently however my blog suffered under the weight of the link building module of the SEO Ultimate WordPress plugin known as the Deep Link Juggernaut.
This module allowed you to simply set keywords and then link them to a URL of your choice. If you have a favorite affiliate product or post you want to link keywords too this was ideal to simply link to your favorite items. Even with the p
The problem is the more links you add the more overhead it takes on your blog as those pages load and the calls have to be made. This is the same problem that a fellow blogger told me they had with MaxPress Affiliate Ninja where the overhead of doing dozens and dozens of link relating was crippling the overhead and performance on their blogs.
The same problem would likely occur with any automated link building plugin, simply the more queries the plugin has to look for to turn into hyperlinks the more it will use your database and the more it will choke your blog.
Andy Bailey from ComLuv.com who also created the awesome CommentLuv Premium plugin first showed me the results from a page test he was doing online (not one I had tested with myself before).
This test showed my site averaging 26-28 seconds load times from various locations dispersed geographically.
I one by one started disabling WordPress plugins until I found the one plugin (SEO Ultimate) that drastically changed these times:
Once SEO Ultimate was disabled I saw my times drop to below 3 seconds, I re-enabled and my timings went up again to the high 20’s.
I then disabled each module one by one in SEO Ultimate until I found and traced the problem specifically to the DeepLink Juggernaut module in SEO Ultimate. I had about 60-70 links in there. I did leave SEO Ultimate enabled as I was using some of the other features like the Rich Snippet Creator and the Permalinks modifier for my categories.
The beauty is that I could never get above 86/100 on Google PageSpeed Tools no matter how much tweaking I did, and now with SEO Ultimate Deeplink Juggernaut disabled I got a 92/100 my highest ever.
Lesson Learned
As tempting as it is to use automated link building inside your post content you save overhead on your blog database by setting the links manually for the keywords in your blog post.
I haven’t specifically used other automated link building plugins but I am still thinking they all would suffer from the same problem. Overhead, my guess is if you do use such plugins then you need to keep it to under 10 keyword links or else you could cripple your website performance as a result.
-Dragon Blogger
