Internal Links: Best Practices

What Internal Links Actually Do

Internal links are, simply, the links that join together the separate pages of your own website. Nothing exotic. Yet they do three jobs that nothing else on your site does:

• • They define your architecture. Search engines infer your site’s structure—what’s a main topic, what’s a detail, what belongs together—almost entirely from how your pages link to each other.
• • They give crawlers a path. Google discovers your pages by following links. A well-constructed site is easy to crawl; a poorly linked one leaves pages undiscovered.
• • They pass authority. The ranking value a page earns—from backlinks, from age, from traffic—flows through its links to the pages it points at. You decide where that value goes.

Here’s the part that should get your attention: backlinks, the subject everyone obsesses over, depend on other people’s decisions. Internal links depend only on yours. They cost nothing, they take effect at your next site update, and most of your competitors are ignoring them. The rest of this chapter is the handful of practices that matter.

Use Descriptive Anchor Text

Anchor text is the visible, clickable part of a link, and it should tell both the reader and the crawler where the link goes. “Click here” and “read more” tell them nothing. “Our guide to content pillars” tells them everything.

Two refinements:

• ✓ Vary the wording. If several pages link to the same destination, change up the anchor text rather than repeating one phrase verbatim. Natural writing varies; boilerplate looks automated.
• ✓ Describe, don’t stuff. The anchor should read like a sentence a human wrote, not a keyword you’re trying to rank for. If every link to a page says exactly “best divorce lawyer Houston,” you’ve traded a useful signal for a suspicious one.

Organize Around Hubs and Spokes

The strongest internal-linking pattern is also the most intuitive one: categories and subcategories. Think of how Amazon is organized—department pages link down to category pages, category pages link down to products, and everything links back up. A visitor (or a crawler) always knows where they are and how to get anywhere else.

For a small business site, that means each core topic gets a hub page, and the detailed pages under it—articles, FAQs, service specifics—link back to the hub while the hub links out to each of them. The links flow both directions. That two-way structure is what turns a pile of pages into a topic cluster search engines recognize.

This is a big enough subject that it has its own chapter on content pillars, including a case study and a free site structure analyzer. The short version: pick the two to four topics you want to own, build a hub for each, and make the internal links do the organizing.

How Many Links Is Too Many?

Older SEO advice put hard numbers on this—“no more than 100 links per page”—and talked a lot about not diluting your “link juice.” The vocabulary has aged badly, but the underlying idea is still sound: a page’s authority is shared among everything it links to. A page with eight purposeful links sends a meaningful signal through each one. A page with 300 links sends almost nothing through any of them.

You don’t need to count links. You need a test: does this link have a reason to exist? If a reader at this spot on this page would plausibly want to go there, link it. If you’re adding it because a plugin suggested it or because more links vaguely seem better, skip it.

A clear hierarchy does most of this work for you. When your site follows the hub-and-spoke structure above, each page naturally links to its hub, a few sibling pages, and not much else. If a page has accumulated dozens of in-content links, that’s usually a sign the page is trying to be about too many things at once.

Send Authority Where It’s Needed

Not all of your pages are equal. Your homepage, and any page that has earned real backlinks, carries more authority than the article you published last Tuesday. Internal links let you route that authority deliberately.

The practical move: when you publish a page you want Google to notice—a new service page, a new article you care about—add a link to it from one of your strongest existing pages, with descriptive anchor text. The strong page’s authority flows to the new one, and the crawler finds it on its next visit instead of whenever it happens to stumble across your sitemap entry.

The same logic applies in reverse. If an old blog post has quietly collected backlinks over the years, make sure it links to the pages that actually earn you business. Plenty of sites have their authority pooled in a 2019 article that links to nothing.

Don’t Link Unrelated Pages

There should be a logic to why one page links to another. A page about estate planning linking to your estate-tax FAQ makes sense. The same page linking to your personal-injury landing page because you’d like that page to rank does not—and search engines have gotten good at telling the difference.

This isn’t just about avoiding penalties. Irrelevant links are a poor experience for readers, and they muddy the topical structure you’re trying to build. If the connection between two pages needs explaining, it probably shouldn’t be a link.

Find and Fix Orphan Pages

An orphan page is a page nothing links to. Maybe it was published and never added to a menu. Maybe it’s only reachable through a search box or behind a form—things a crawler won’t use. Either way, as far as search engines are concerned, orphan pages might as well not exist.

Orphans are common, and they’re usually your own good content: old articles, event pages, resources that fell out of the navigation during a redesign. Three ways to find them:

• 1. Compare your sitemap to your navigation. Open your sitemap.xml and ask, for each URL: could a visitor get here by clicking? Anything that fails is an orphan or close to one.
• 2. Check Google Search Console. The indexing reports show pages Google knows about but has deprioritized—“Discovered, currently not indexed” is often orphan territory.
• 3. Run our free site structure analyzer. The tool on the content pillars chapter reads your sitemap and flags structural gaps, including likely orphans.

The fix is the easy part: link to the orphan from the most relevant page you have, with descriptive anchor text. If you can’t find any page where a link to it would make sense, that’s worth sitting with—it may be telling you the page doesn’t belong on your site at all.

The Bottom Line

Good internal linking isn’t a trick, and it doesn’t require a tool subscription. It’s five habits: descriptive anchor text, a hub-and-spoke structure, links that each have a reason to exist, authority routed toward the pages that need it, and no orphans.

The bonus is that every one of these practices also makes your site easier for humans to use. A visitor who can always find the next relevant page stays longer, reads more, and is likelier to pick up the phone. Search engines are just the second audience.

You can’t control who links to you. You can completely control how your site links to itself. Start there.