: Internal links — links from one page on your site to another — help search engines discover new pages, understand your site’s structure, and distribute ranking authority (“link equity”) across your content.
Why internal linking matters: A page with no internal links pointing to it (an “orphan page”) is harder for both users and search engines to find, no matter how good the content is. Meanwhile, pages that receive links from many other relevant pages tend to be seen as more important within your site’s overall structure.
Best practices: - Use descriptive anchor text. Instead of “click here,” use text that describes the destination page’s topic — this helps both users and search engines understand context. - Link from high-authority pages to priority pages. Your homepage and top-performing content typically pass the most link equity — use that to support pages you want to rank. - Keep important pages within a few clicks of the homepage. Pages buried five or six clicks deep are crawled less frequently and seen as less important. - Avoid orphan pages. Regularly audit for pages with zero internal links pointing to them — these are effectively invisible to your site’s own link structure. - Don’t over-optimize anchor text. Repeating the exact same keyword-stuffed anchor text across dozens of links can look manipulative rather than natural.
A simple, high-impact habit: whenever you publish new content, go back and add a few contextual links to it from older, relevant, already-indexed pages — this speeds up discovery and indexing significantly.
Contextual links vs navigation links
Navigation, footer and sidebar links appear on every page and tell Google about your site's overall structure. Contextual links, placed inside the body text, carry more meaning because the surrounding words describe why the linked page is relevant. Both matter, but most sites under-use contextual links. A related-posts widget is helpful for readers, but it doesn't replace links written into the content.
How many internal links should a page have?
There is no fixed number. A useful rule of thumb for blog posts is 3–5 contextual links to closely related pages, plus a link to the relevant hub or service page. Add links where they genuinely help the reader take the next step. Pages with hundreds of links dilute the value of each one and are harder to use.
Build topic hubs
Organise content into clusters: one broad hub page on a topic (for example a technical SEO guide), with supporting articles on narrower subtopics. The hub links to every supporting article, and each supporting article links back to the hub and to one or two sibling articles. This structure helps Google understand your expertise on the topic and spreads authority to the pages that need it. Learn more about topic clusters.
How to find internal linking opportunities
- Site search: search Google for
site:yourdomain.com "keyword"to find pages that mention a topic but don't link to the main page about it. - Search Console: open the Links report → "Top linked pages" (internal) to see which pages receive the fewest internal links.
- Crawl data: crawl the site and sort by "Inlinks". Pages with zero or one inlink are candidates. Pages that appear in the sitemap but not in the crawl are orphan pages. See our guide to finding and fixing orphan pages.
- Performance data: pages ranking in positions 8–20 often get a boost from a few extra relevant internal links.
Anchor text tips
- Describe the destination: "our guide to canonical tags" is better than "this article".
- Vary the wording naturally across different links to the same page.
- Keep anchors short, usually 2–6 words.
- Don't use the same anchor text for two different pages. It sends mixed signals about which page covers the topic.
Internal linking maintenance
Links break when URLs change or posts are deleted. Run a monthly crawl to catch internal links that point to 404 pages or go through redirects, and update them to point directly at the final URL. When you merge or delete content, update every internal link that pointed to the old page.
