--- title: "IFTTT's internal linking fix and its 33% YoY traffic gain" url: https://surfil.com/blog/ifttt-internal-linking-traffic-case-uproer section: studies language: en 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 when 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 measured numbers 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. ## Common 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)