--- title: "IFTTT's internal linking fix and its 33% YoY traffic gain" url: https://seomadman.com/studies/ifttt-internal-linking-traffic-case-uproer section: studies published: 2026-09-16T00:00:00.000Z modified: 2026-09-16T00:00:00.000Z author: Adam Hafez topics: ["Technical SEO"] --- # IFTTT's internal linking fix and its 33% YoY traffic gain ## The short answer Agency Uproer's published case study on IFTTT.com found searchbots could crawl only 59 pages through the site's internal links, because those links were JavaScript-rendered. An HTML sitemap, then server-side rendering and new navigation links, followed. Indexed pages rose nearly 3x in two weeks, and IFTTT saw 33% year-over-year organic traffic growth. ## Key takeaways - Uproer's case study describes client IFTTT, the SaaS automation platform, having hundreds of thousands of indexable pages but internal links rendered only in JavaScript. - A Screaming Frog crawl mimicking a searchbot's link-only path found just 59 pages reachable, a crawlability problem the agency treated as the root internal linking issue. - Launching an HTML sitemap so those links existed in raw HTML delivered, per the case study, nearly a 3x increase in indexed pages within two weeks. - The agency later added server-side rendering plus breadcrumb, sidebar and footer navigation as a longer-term site-wide interlinking fix, over a 6-month engagement. - Uproer attributes 33% year-over-year traffic growth to the engagement, but its own write-up says linking was prioritized alongside a broader audit, not tested alone. IFTTT, the SaaS platform that automates actions between apps and devices, is a large site by page count and a public, named one, which makes agency Uproer's published account of its internal linking rebuild worth reading directly rather than through a summary. We fetched the case study itself to check which numbers are measured outcomes and which are illustrative examples, since the two are easy to blur together in a piece written to sell an SEO service. ## What was actually broken Uproer's starting diagnosis was crawlability, not link strategy. IFTTT.com carried hundreds of thousands of indexable pages, but its internal links rendered only in JavaScript. Running a Screaming Frog crawl configured the way a searchbot follows links, ignoring JavaScript, the agency found only 59 pages reachable at all. That number is the case study's anchor: almost the entire site was invisible to a crawler that could not execute the site's scripts, no matter how the pages themselves were organized. ## What changed, and over what timeframe The fix came in phases across a 6-month engagement. First, an HTML sitemap page listing site URLs in plain HTML, a near-term patch that did not require a front-end rebuild. Then server-side rendering, so the site's real internal links existed in the raw HTML search engines fetch instead of only in client-side JavaScript. Longer term, the agency added breadcrumb links, sidebar navigation, footer navigation and a content-based internal linking strategy connecting related pages to each other, the site-wide interlinking layer the earlier fixes made worth building. ## The numbers the source reports as measured Two figures in the case study are presented as actual outcomes, not projections. The HTML sitemap launch alone delivered, in the agency's words, nearly a 3x increase in indexed pages within two weeks, evidence that Google had pages to find once they existed in crawlable HTML. Over the full 6-month engagement, Uproer reports IFTTT achieved 33% year-over-year organic traffic growth, describing internal linking as the tactic the team made a priority. A separate figure in the same piece, an indexing rate moving from 60% to 80% producing a 15% traffic lift, is explicitly labeled a hypothetical example for estimating opportunity size, not a real IFTTT measurement, and we have left it out of the metrics above for that reason. ## Why the attribution needs a caveat The 33% growth figure is the headline number, and it is real in the sense that the source states it as IFTTT's actual result. But the engagement was not an internal-linking-only test: Uproer's own description includes a full technical and content audit running in parallel, so the traffic gain cannot be cleanly isolated to the linking rebuild the way a controlled split test could isolate it. What the source does support cleanly is the crawlability finding, 59 pages reachable out of hundreds of thousands, and the two-week indexed-page jump that followed the HTML sitemap fix specifically. Treat those two as the most load-bearing numbers in this case, and the 33% as a real but multi-cause result from the same engagement. ## Frequently asked questions ### Did internal linking alone cause the 33% traffic growth? Uproer's own write-up does not claim that. The 6-month engagement included a full technical and content audit, and the agency frames internal linking as the tactic it prioritized within that broader work, not as an isolated variable. We report the 33% figure as the engagement's headline result, with that caveat attached. ### What number did searchbots actually find when crawling IFTTT's internal links? Per the case study, a Screaming Frog crawl configured to follow only internal links, the way a searchbot would, reached just 59 pages, despite IFTTT.com having hundreds of thousands of indexable pages. That gap is the case study's starting point. ### Is the 60% to 80% indexing rate figure in the source a real IFTTT number? No. That figure appears in the source under a hypothetical example used to illustrate how to estimate the value of an indexing fix to stakeholders, not as a measured IFTTT result. We leave it out of this piece's metrics. ## Sources 1. [How an Overlooked SEO Tactic Delivered 33% Traffic Growth [SaaS Case Study]](https://uproer.com/articles/ifttt-saas-case-study/) - Uproer (primary)