What is Internal linking?

Internal linking means linking from one page of your site to another page of the same site: navigation menus, breadcrumbs, related-article blocks and — most valuable of all — links inside the body text. It’s the part of link building you fully control.

What internal links do

• Discovery — crawlers find most pages by following links. A page with no internal links is an orphan page and may rarely be crawled.
• Context — the anchor text and the surrounding sentence tell search engines what the target covers.
• Importance — pages linked from many places, and close to the homepage, receive more internal PageRank and tend to be crawled more often.
• People — a good link answers the reader’s next question and moves them toward the page they actually need.

Google’s link best practices stress that links must be real <a> elements with an href attribute to be followed reliably.

A structure that works: hubs and spokes

Group related content into topic clusters. A hub page — say, “Houseplant care” — links to every detailed guide in the cluster; each guide links back to the hub and sideways to closely related guides where it helps the reader.

<p>Orchids need a chunky bark mix rather than soil — see
  <a href="/guides/orchid-potting-mix">choosing an orchid potting mix</a>.
  If the roots look brown and soft, read
  <a href="/guides/root-rot">how to treat root rot</a> first.</p>

Contextual links like these carry more meaning than a footer with 80 links, because the text around them explains the relationship.

Practical rules

1. Keep important pages within about three clicks of the homepage.
2. When you publish a page, add links to it from two or three relevant existing pages. A sitemap entry alone isn’t enough.
3. Link to final URLs, not to redirects or non-canonical variants.
4. Use descriptive anchors and let them vary naturally.
5. Revisit old popular posts and link them to newer, deeper content.

Common mistakes

• Nofollow on internal links. It doesn’t conserve anything; it just weakens your own pages.
• Navigation built in JavaScript without crawlable href links.
• Links to deleted pages left behind after a cleanup, causing 404s for visitors and wasted crawls.
• Over-linking: every other phrase linked, so no single link stands out.
• Pagination dead ends, where older posts can only be reached through page 47 of the archive.

Audit your internal links

The link analyzer lists every internal and external link on a page with anchor text, rel attributes, empty anchors and counts. For a site-wide view, the website SEO audit crawls your whole site on paid plans and reports broken internal links, while the broken link checker tests up to 200 links on a single page for free.

Frequently asked questions