• Every important page should be reachable through crawlable HTML links, ideally within three or four clicks of the homepage.
• Descriptive anchor text tells users and search engines what to expect.
• Link from your strongest pages to the ones you most want to rank.
• Fix orphan pages, broken links and links to redirected URLs.
• Contextual links within body copy carry more meaning than boilerplate links.

Internal links are how authority and context flow around a site. External links bring authority in. Internal links decide where it goes. Because you control them completely, they are often the quickest route to improving a page that is stuck on page two.

What internal links do

• Discovery: crawlers find pages by following links.
• Hierarchy: pages with many internal links are treated as more important.
• Context: anchor text and surrounding copy describe the target page.
• Authority distribution: link equity is shared among the pages a page links to.
• User journeys: they guide people to the next useful thing.

Types of internal link

• Navigation: main menu and footer. Present on every page, so powerful and blunt.
• Breadcrumbs: show hierarchy and link upwards.
• Contextual: links within body copy. The most meaningful kind.
• Related content modules: related products, further reading, popular articles.
• Hub pages: category or pillar pages that link out to everything on a topic.
• HTML sitemaps: a handy safety net on large sites.

Site architecture

Aim for a structure where important pages are few clicks from the homepage and related pages link to one another. A popular model is the hub and spoke, or topic cluster: one comprehensive page on a broad subject links to detailed pages on each subtopic, and each of those links back to the hub and across to its siblings.

Click depth matters more than folder depth. A page buried six clicks down is crawled less often and treated as less important, whatever its URL looks like.

Anchor text

• Be descriptive. "Guide to canonical tags" is better than "click here".
• Vary it naturally. Internal anchors are far less risky than external ones, but identical exact-match anchors everywhere look mechanical.
• Do not use the same anchor text for two different target pages.
• Keep it reasonably short.
• For linked images, alt text serves as the anchor.

Make links crawlable

 <a href="/guides/canonical-tags">Guide to canonical tags</a> 

Use anchor elements with a real href. Links created with onclick handlers, buttons or JavaScript-only navigation may not be followed. Avoid adding nofollow to internal links: it does not sculpt PageRank, it simply discards it.

How to find opportunities

• Search your own site for mentions of a topic that are not yet linked (site:example.com "canonical tags").
• Identify your most linked-to pages from external sites and add links from them to priority pages.
• Look for pages ranking in positions 5 to 20, which often respond well to extra internal links.
• Check new content: every new page should receive links from existing relevant pages, not just give them.

How many links per page?

There is no fixed limit. Google can process thousands. The practical point is dilution: the more links on a page, the less each one passes and the harder it is for users to choose. Enormous mega menus that link to every page on the site flatten the hierarchy and make every page look equally important.

Common mistakes

• Orphan pages with no internal links at all.
• Internal links that point to redirected or broken URLs.
• Links to non-canonical URLs such as parameter versions.
• Generic anchors such as "read more" repeated down a page.
• Important pages linked only from the footer or the sitemap.
• Automated linking plugins that add dozens of identical keyword links.
• Mobile navigation that drops links present on desktop.

How to test

• A site crawler reports click depth, inlink counts, orphan pages (when combined with sitemap or analytics data), broken links and anchor text.
• Search Console's Links report shows your most internally linked pages.
• Log files show whether crawlers actually reach deep pages.

The GEO angle

Internal links help AI systems in two ways. Crawlers follow them to discover content just as search bots do, and the cluster of pages around a topic signals depth of coverage. When an assistant fans a question out into several sub-queries, a site with well-linked pages covering each angle has more chances to be retrieved.

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