Content clusters help search engines to determine the expertise that you have on a topic and reward your site with better rankings. It is the relevant internal links which help you build the perfect content clusters. Once the search engines learn about your high quality content cluster on a topic via the internal links, it helps them surface the various pages of you site, forming part of the content cluster for a topic, for the various keywords that their users use to search on that topic.
It also helps the users landing on your site to find their way through the content cluster, to find the answer for their search intent.
Links are the very basis of Internet. Every site need to build internal and external links that are relevant to the content on its pages, as these are useful for its users. They help in improving user engagement metrics. Links are also useful for the search engines like Google to discover new content, understand the site architecture and content clusters.
Likewise, if an internal link redirects to lead its users and search engines to the destination page, it is again bad for performance and user experience. Redirected internal links which are quite common during site migration or even otherwise, need to be corrected as well.
It is also a good practice to do a regular audit of links for keeping track of which page/post links to which other pages on site, in its content, and what anchor texts are used for such links. This helps in identifying orphaned pages i.e. pages that are not linked to by any other post or page. It also helps in building a content hub that tells the search engines about the relevancy of content within the hub, which in turn contributes to better ranking in search engines. It also helps in better distribution of PageRank.
An external link that redirects need to be monitored and fixed as well, as some spam sites redirect to pages on other sites after a period of time. This could either be the handiwork of spammers or the site owners themselves. Hence, such external links that redirect are not only bad for relevancy but also linking to bad/irrelevant sites may result in lowering the user experience. The search engines might also penalize the linking site by lowering its rank.
It is thus absolutely essential to do a regular link audit on your site/sites and Techblissonline Platinum SEO Premium helps you achieve this in WordPress by automating link audit on a contual basis. It reports all its findings through its several user friendly dashboad and reports. You can check a demo of all these functionalities in the following video.