Internal Links: Beginers to Advance Guide with Case Study

TL;DR: Internal links are the blood vessels of your website, connecting one page to another within the same site.

They keep your site’s content alive by carrying “authority” and visitors between pages, much like blood vessels carry nutrients in a body. 

In short, internal links help users navigate and help search engines understand and rank your content.

Imagine your website as a big city. Internal links are the roads and highways that connect all the neighborhoods (pages) together. Without them, each page would be an isolated island that’s hard to find. 

In this guide, we’ll cover everything from basic concepts to advanced strategies for internal linking – plus the common mistakes to avoid – so you can optimize these “roads” for both SEO and user experience. 

Are you ready to unlock the hidden power of internal links on your site? Let’s get started! 

What is an internal link?

What exactly is an internal link? An internal link is any hyperlink that points from one page on your website to another page on the same website. 

For example, if you have a blog article and it links to your “About Us” page, that’s an internal link. These differ from external links, which point to pages on a different website (more on that in a second). 

Both users and search engine crawlers use internal links to discover content on your site. 

If a page on your site has no other pages linking to it, visitors might never know it exists, and search engines might not find or index it at all.

This is why internal links are more than just simple hyperlinks – they are essential connections in your site’s architecture.

Internal vs. External Links (with Examples)

It’s important to distinguish internal links from external links. An internal link, as we said, keeps visitors within your own site. An external link sends visitors away to a different domain. For example:

If you’re reading a Wikipedia article and click a blue word that takes you to another Wikipedia page, that’s an internal link. It keeps you on Wikipedia.

If you click a link that takes you from Wikipedia to a source on another site, that’s an external link. It jumps you to a different website.

Internal links connect your own pages together; external links connect your pages to the wider web. Both are useful, but they serve different purposes. 

Internal links help your readers and Google navigate within your content kingdom, while external links can provide references or point to outside resources.

Example: On your homepage, you might have a menu link to your “Shop” page – that’s an internal link. If you mention a statistic and link to the source on another site (like a news article), that’s an external link.

Key point: This guide focuses on internal linking, because it’s something you 100% control as a site owner. You decide how to link your pages together, creating a roadmap for both users and search engine crawlers.

Types of Internal Links

Not all internal links are the same. Let’s break down the common types of internal links you’ll find on a website, with easy examples:

Navigational Links: 

These are the menu, header, footer, or sidebar links that appear on every page (or many pages). They help users navigate the main sections of your site. 

For instance, a header menu with “Home | Products | About | Contact” uses navigational internal links. Similarly, footer links to your Privacy Policy or FAQ are navigational. 

These links ensure important pages are always just one click away.

Contextual Links: 

These are links within the main content of your pages or posts (often in paragraphs of text). They point to other relevant pages on your site. 

For example, a blog post about gardening might mention soil types and link a phrase “soil pH guide” to another article on your site about testing soil pH. 

Contextual links are often the most valuable for SEO because they occur in the context of related content, helping Google see how your topics are connected.

Breadcrumb Links: 

Breadcrumbs usually appear near the top of a page and show the trail of pages from the home page to the current page. 

They look something like: Home > Category > Subcategory > Current Page. 

Each part is a link (except the current page). Breadcrumb internal links help users know where they are and let them click back to higher-level pages easily. 

They also help search engines understand your site’s hierarchy and can improve crawl efficiency. 

Have you noticed Google often shows breadcrumb paths in search results? That’s because of these links and structured data.

Related Content Links:

 Many websites have sections like “You may also like…” or “Related posts” at the end of an article. These are internal links to other content a reader might find interesting or relevant. 

For example, an e-commerce product page might show “Related products” linking to similar items. 

Or a blog post might have “Recommended for you” links to similar articles. These links keep users engaged and encourage them to explore more pages.

Footer/Sidebar Links: 

Aside from main navigation, internal links often appear in sidebars (e.g., a list of recent posts, popular posts) or in the footer (site-wide links). 

These help with navigation and ensuring important pages get linked site-wide. Just be cautious not to overload these sections with too many links, which can overwhelm users.

Each type of internal link has a role. Navigational and breadcrumb links build your site’s structural backbone, while contextual and related-content links create a web of connections between related pieces of content. 

Together, they make sure that all pages on your site are interconnected and none are left orphaned (isolated).

Anatomy of an Internal Link (Anchor & HREF)

Let’s quickly look at what an internal link looks like “under the hood.” In HTML, a basic internal link is created with an <a> (anchor) tag, for example:

html

<a href="/about-us">About Us</a>

Here, href="/about-us" is the URL path to the target page (in this case, the About Us page on the same domain). 

The text “About Us” between the tags is the anchor text – that’s the clickable text users see. If this link were on example.com, clicking it would take you to example.com/about-us, which is an internal page.

The anchor text is important: it should briefly describe or indicate what the linked page is about. In our example, the anchor text “About Us” clearly tells you the link goes to the About Us page. 

Good anchor text helps people and search engines understand the context of the link. (Avoid generic text like “click here” – it’s not descriptive.)

Tip: For an internal link to count, it should be a proper HTML <a> tag with an href. Links that rely on JavaScript events or other formats might not be crawled reliably by Google. 

In other words, stick to standard anchor tags for your internal links so search engines can follow them easily.

Now that we know what internal links are and the basic types, let’s dive into why these links are so crucial for SEO and how they influence your website’s performance.

How Internal Linking Impacts SEO?

Internal linking isn’t just about making your site navigable – it has direct impacts on SEO (Search Engine Optimization). 

In fact, Google’s own representatives have emphasized how critical internal links are for SEO. Google’s John Mueller famously stated that internal linking is “super critical for SEO”. 

But why is that the case? Let’s explore the key ways internal links affect your site’s search engine health and rankings.

Crawlability: Helping Search Engines Discover Pages

This visual explaining How Google discovers Pages

Image source: Semrush

Think of Google’s crawler (Googlebot) as a little spider that lands on your homepage and starts following links. Internal links are its pathways to find all your pages. 

If some pages have no links pointing to them, Google’s crawler might skip them entirely. In essence, internal links determine which pages get discovered and how easily.

Discovery of New Content: Whenever you publish a new page or post, adding internal links to it (from other pages or navigation) gives Google more ways to find that new page. 

For example, if you add a link to your new blog post from an older, already indexed post, Google’s crawler can follow that link and index the new content faster.

Crawl Depth: Search engines allocate a certain “crawl budget” (crawl time and frequency) to each site. 

If a page is buried 10 clicks deep with no intermediate links, crawlers might not reach it often (or at all). Pages more than 3 or 4 clicks from the homepage are at risk of poor indexation. 

In fact, SEO experts note that Google’s crawlers are unlikely to consistently browse pages more than about 3 clicks away from your homepage. 

That means those deep pages might not get indexed or updated in Google’s index as quickly. A good practice is to keep important pages within a few clicks of the home or category pages to ensure they get crawled regularly.

Avoiding Orphan Pages: An orphan page is a page with no internal links pointing to it. It’s essentially invisible to your site’s navigation structure. 

Orphan pages are bad for SEO because Google might never find them or consider them unimportant. It’s reported that about 25% of web pages have zero internal links (orphans) on many sites – that’s a quarter of pages potentially underperforming.

By using internal links thoughtfully, you can eliminate orphan pages. For example, if you publish a new product page, make sure it’s linked from its category page or mentioned in a related product’s description, etc.

In summary, robust internal linking improves your site’s crawlability – search engines can traverse your site easily and find all your valuable content. 

You’re basically laying out breadcrumbs for Googlebot to ensure no good page is left undiscovered.

Link Equity Distribution (Passing “Link Juice”)

Beyond just finding pages, internal links also help distribute ranking power throughout your site. This concept is often called passing link equity or “link juice.” Here’s how it works:

Every page on your site has some amount of authority or PageRank (Google’s original term for link-based importance). 

When one page links to another, it can pass some of its authority to the page it links to. External backlinks (links from other websites) are a big source of authority. But internal links let you channel that authority to where it’s needed most on your own site.

Boosting Important Pages: Suppose your homepage has many backlinks and is your highest-authority page. 

By linking from the homepage to an important sub-page (say, a key product or pillar article), you’re funneling some of that authority to it. 

A well-planned internal linking strategy “can help pass the value of high-quality backlinks from one page to another.” 

In other words, you can share the ranking power from strong pages to other pages that need a boost.

PageRank Flow: Think of link equity like water flowing through pipes. External links bring water into your site, and internal links direct that water to different reservoirs (pages). 

If you have a page you want to rank well, you should direct more internal links (from relevant high-authority pages) to it. 

Brian Dean, a notable SEO expert, used this tactic: when he had a brand new guide with no backlinks, he added internal links to it from his top-performing pages, which helped that new page rank on page 1 of Google.

Not All Links Are Equal: It’s worth noting that an internal link doesn’t carry as much weight as a powerful external backlink from another site. 

However, internal links still help, especially since you can often create many more of them in a controlled way. 

They certainly do pass PageRank and ranking signals within your site (Google confirms that it uses links to understand relevancy and importance of pages). 

So, while one internal link might not be a game-changer, the cumulative effect of a smart internal linking structure is significant.

Avoiding Dilution: There is a point of diminishing returns. If a page has too many links, the value passed by each link may be very small. 

In fact, an industry study analyzing 23 million internal links found that pages with about 45 to 50 internal links saw a significant boost in organic traffic, but beyond 50 links the benefits started to reverse. 

Google’s John Mueller has also noted that having an excessive number of links on every page can reduce their effectiveness. 

So it’s about finding a balance – link generously, but not recklessly. (Don’t worry, we’ll cover guidelines on how many links to use later.)

Bottom line: internal links allow you to sculpt how “SEO juice” flows through your site. By linking to your most valuable pages, you ensure they get their fair share of authority. It’s a way of telling Google, “These pages are important – pay attention to them!”

Improving Indexation of Orphan Pages

We touched on orphan pages in crawlability, but it’s worth underscoring: internal links are usually the cure for orphan pages. An orphan page is not linked from anywhere on your site, which often means:

• Google might not index it, because it’s not easily found through crawling (unless it’s in your XML sitemap or someone happened to link to it externally).
  
• Even if Google indexes it, the page might be considered unimportant (since your own site doesn’t link to it, which is like saying “we don’t consider this page integral to our content”).
  

By adding just one or two internal links to an orphan page from other pages, you bring it back into the fold. 

This signals to Google the page is part of your site network and should be indexed and valued. 

For example, if you have a lonely article that isn’t in any category list, you could mention it in a relevant newer article like “As I explained in [Older Article]…” with a link. Now it’s no longer an orphan.

Internal links also help with indexation in general. Even if a page isn’t orphaned, it might be very deep. 

Linking it from a higher-level page gives Google an alternative (and shorter) path to reach it, thus it may get crawled more frequently and kept fresher in the index.

Think of it like creating shortcuts for the crawler. If Page C is usually only found by going A → B → C, you can create a direct link A → C. Now Google can jump straight to C, improving its indexation.

Real example: 

A large e-commerce site noticed that some product pages deep in subcategories weren’t getting much organic traffic. They realized those pages were 3-4 clicks from the homepage. 

The team added more internal links to those deep pages (from higher category levels), effectively shortening the click depth. The result? 

A +24% increase in organic traffic to those deeper pages after increasing internal links to them. Making pages easier to reach via internal links helped Google index and rank them better.

Relevance & Semantic Context

Internal links do more than pass technical signals; they also provide context. 

The words you choose as anchor text, and the relationship between the pages, help search engines understand what your pages are about and how they relate to each other.

Anchor Text as a Clue: The anchor text of an internal link tells Google something about the page you’re linking to. 

For instance, if many pages on your cooking blog link to a page with the anchor “chocolate chip cookies recipe,” Google gets a strong signal that the target page is about chocolate chip cookies. 

Using descriptive, keyword-rich (but natural) anchor text for internal links can improve the relevance signals for the target page. 

Unlike external backlinks (where over-optimized anchor text can be risky), internal links give you more freedom to use clear, relevant anchors because you control the context. 

Just don’t be spammy or repetitive about it (more on that in Best Practices).

Topical Connections: By linking related pages together, you create a semantic network. For example, if you have a “Digital Marketing” hub page and you link it to pages about SEO, Content Marketing, Social Media, etc., 

You’re signaling that all those pages are related topics. This helps establish a thematic or topical relevance in Google’s eyes. 

It’s like building your own mini Wikipedia – interconnecting articles on related subjects so Google sees you cover the whole topic area.

Hierarchy and Context: Internal links (especially breadcrumbs or category-to-subcategory links) reinforce the hierarchy. 

Google understands that if “Laptops” page links down to various laptop product pages, those products belong in the context of the “Laptops” category. 

Similarly, if a blog post links up to a “Ultimate Guide” page on the topic, Google might infer that the guide is a cornerstone piece and the blog post is a supporting piece on a subtopic. 

This semantic context can improve how Google evaluates content relevance and authority. It might help your important “hub” pages rank better for broad terms, while supporting pages rank for narrower terms.

User context = SEO context: Remember, anything that helps users understand content likely helps search engines too (since Google’s goal is to emulate what’s best for users). 

If internal links point you to genuinely relevant further reading, that means those pages truly cover aspects of the topic – making your site as a whole more authoritative on that topic. 

For example, linking to a definition of a term the first time you mention it not only helps an 8-year-old (or any reader) understand it, but also shows Google you have an explanation of that term on your site.

In short, internal links knit your content into a coherent web of knowledge. They tell the story of how your pages relate, which boosts your topical authority (more on that later) and helps ensure the right pages show up for the right searches.

UX & Behavioral Signals

SEO isn’t just about pleasing algorithms – it’s also about user experience (UX). Interestingly, internal links can improve several user engagement metrics that search engines pay attention to, such as bounce rate, dwell time, and pages per visit.

Reduced Bounce Rate: “Bounce rate” is the percentage of visitors who leave after viewing only one page. 

Internal links that entice readers to click through to another page will reduce bounce rate (because the visitor didn’t leave your site, they kept browsing). 

For instance, if someone lands on a blog post and you have a prominent “Related Articles” section at the top or a compelling inline link that makes them curious, they might click and continue on your site instead of hitting back. 

Brian Dean noted from his tests that putting internal links towards the top of the page can significantly reduce bounce rate. Why? Visitors immediately see there’s more interesting stuff to explore, so they don’t bounce.

Longer Dwell Time: Dwell time refers to how long a visitor stays on your site after coming from a search result, before going back to Google. 

If your internal links keep them reading article after article, the total time they spend increases. This is generally seen as a positive engagement signal. 

In fact, placing engaging internal links high on the page led to improved dwell time in experiments. 

From Google’s perspective, if users stick around on your site for a long time (instead of pogo-sticking back to the search results immediately), it suggests your site is satisfying their query, which could indirectly help your rankings.

More Page Views per Session: This is straightforward – if people click internal links, they view more pages. Beyond the metrics, this also means they’re likely finding more value. 

For example, one page might not convert a visitor, but the next page they click might convince them to sign up or make a purchase. 

Also, multiple page views give your brand or message more exposure to the visitor, which is a good thing.

Improved Conversion Path: If you strategically use internal links to guide users (like from an informational blog post to a product page or a sign-up page), you’re moving them down the conversion funnel. 

That’s great for business (though strictly speaking, conversion optimization is a separate field, it’s a beneficial side effect of good internal linking).

Google has said that these user behavior metrics are not direct ranking factors in a simplistic way – but they certainly care about delivering results that users love. 

High bounce rates coupled with quick returns to search might indicate a page wasn’t what the user wanted. 

On the flip side, if users consistently click a search result and then spend a while on that site clicking around, it’s a good sign that the result was useful. 

So internal links contributing to positive user behavior can only help your SEO indirectly. 

As Brian Dean humorously put it, when someone spends a long time on your site, it tells Google: “People are loving this result!”.

Ask yourself: when you visit a site like Wikipedia, do you often find yourself clicking from one article to the next, getting deeper into the rabbit hole? 

I know I do! That’s internal linking at work – it captivates users. And guess what? Wikipedia’s dominance in Google Search is partly due to its powerful internal linking. 

The average Wikipedia article contains hundreds of internal links (500+ on many pages!) connecting to other topics. 

This not only educates readers thoroughly (increasing time on site), but ensures every Wikipedia page is well-connected and none are orphaned. 

It’s no wonder Wikipedia ranks for almost everything – their internal links have built an information web that both users and search engines adore.

Topical Authority and Semantic Connectivity

Finally, internal links help establish your site’s topical authority. This is a bit abstract but very important in SEO today, as search engines strive to understand topics, not just keywords.

By linking all your related content, you signal that you have breadth and depth on the subject. It’s like creating your own mini encyclopedia on a topic. 

This can boost your authority in Google’s eyes for that entire topic area.

Content Hubs and Clusters: A common SEO strategy is the “hub-and-spoke” or topic cluster model (which we’ll detail later). 

It involves a central hub page on a broad topic, and multiple sub-pages on specific subtopics, all interlinked. Executed well, it shows that your site comprehensively covers the topic. 

For example, if you run a health blog and you have a hub page on “Nutrition Guide,” with sub-pages on “Protein Diets,” “Vitamins and Minerals,” “Meal Planning,” etc., and they all link logically, your site is presenting itself as an authority on nutrition. 

Each internal link in that cluster reinforces the semantic connection between those pieces.

Expertise Signals: Google’s algorithms (and human quality raters) assess a site’s expertise, authority, and trust (E-A-T). 

By internally linking to your cornerstone content or to related research you’ve done, you’re basically citing yourself and building a case that you know your stuff. 

It’s similar to academic papers citing each other within a body of research by the same authors – it forms a cohesive knowledge base.

Semantic Connectivity: With advances in AI and NLP (Natural Language Processing), search engines are getting better at understanding context and relationships. 

Internal linking helps feed these algorithms with clear connections. It’s like drawing a big concept map. 

The anchor text and the content around the link might contain thematic keywords, which can help Google’s semantic algorithms see “oh, all these pages talk about semantic SEO in different ways and link together – definitely this site has a cluster about semantic SEO.

To wrap up this section: internal links significantly impact SEO by ensuring all pages are found and indexed, by distributing ranking power, by clarifying relevance, by improving user engagement, and by strengthening your topical authority. 

It’s a powerful multi-faceted tool. In fact, 42% of marketers say they spend as much time on internal linking as on external link building, which shows how critical it is in modern SEO strategy. 

Now that you know why internal links matter, let’s look at how they shape your site’s overall structure.

The Role of Internal Links in Site Architecture

Your site architecture is basically how your website’s pages are organized and connected – like the blueprint of a building or the sitemap of a city. 

Internal links are the paths and bridges that hold that architecture together. A well-thought-out internal linking structure creates a sturdy, navigable site; a poor structure can leave parts of your site in a maze or dead-ends.

Let’s explore a few models of site structure and how internal linking plays a role:

Flat vs. Deep Site Structures

A flat structure means most pages are only a click or two away from the homepage. A deep structure means some pages might be buried several layers down (lots of clicks to reach).

Flat Structure: Imagine a pancake – wide and flat. For websites, flat means if you go to the homepage, you can reach the majority of pages with just one or two clicks (through menus, categories, etc.). 

Flat is generally good for SEO because it means shallow crawl depth. Search engines can easily reach all pages, and link equity flows more evenly. 

Users also don’t have to click through many levels to find something. Effective internal linking (like thorough navigation menus, interlinking between related pages, etc.) flattens your site. 

For instance, Wikipedia is relatively flat – almost any article is reachable via a link from another because of extensive cross-linking, even if not directly from the homepage.

Deep Structure: Think of an inverted tree or a deep well. You might have to go through multiple submenus or category pages to reach the final content. 

Some depth is natural (especially on large sites). But if it’s too deep, problems arise: users might give up navigating, and Google might assign less importance to very deep pages. 

Remember, as John Mueller hinted, a page that’s one click from the home page often gets more weight than one that’s five clicks away. Deep pages also risk not being crawled as frequently.

Internal linking is what allows you to flatten a deep site: Even if your content is organized in subcategories, you can add cross-links and shortcuts. 

For example, suppose you have a deep page that’s four levels down in the e-commerce hierarchy. 

You could add an internal link to it from a related blog post or from a “Featured Products” section on the homepage. Suddenly, that page isn’t so deep anymore in terms of click distance.

There’s also an oft-cited “three-click rule” in web design which suggests any content should be reachable in 3 clicks or less. This isn’t a strict rule from Google, but it’s a good usability goal. 

Many SEO professionals echo that pages beyond 3 clicks tend to underperform. If you find pages on your site that take 5-6 clicks to get to, consider adding internal links from higher up to shorten that path.

Analogy: A flat site is like a city with many direct roads between locations, whereas a deep site is like a city where you have to traverse a long chain of one-way streets to get to certain neighborhoods. The former is faster and more user-friendly.

Silo Structure Explained (with Visuals)

You may have heard the term “SEO silo”. This is a way of structuring a site so that content is grouped into tight categories (silos), and you mainly link within each silo but not as much across silos. 

Silo Structure Explained with Visuals

It’s like having separate sections of a library for different topics.

• In a hard silo, the site’s categories might even be separate in the URL structure (e.g., abc.com/fitness/* contains all fitness pages, abc.com/nutrition/* contains nutrition pages). You’d link pages within fitness to each other, and within nutrition to each other, but not often between fitness and nutrition. This keeps topical content very contained.
  
• In a soft silo, the separation is done via internal linking rather than URL. For example, your blog might not have category folders, but you intentionally only cross-link articles that share a topic and avoid linking to unrelated topics.
  

The idea behind siloing is to build very focused topical sections, which can make your site more authoritative in each niche and avoid diluting relevance. 

Internal links in a silo structure: you link a lot within the silo (e.g., all “fitness” articles link to other fitness articles or the main fitness page), but you do not typically link to the “cooking” silo from a fitness article, for instance.

This has a couple of effects:

• It reinforces topical relevance (all links point to content in the same theme).
  
• It funnels link equity within that silo, hopefully making the main silo page (pillar page) and its children strong for that topic.
  
• It can make parts of your site isolated from each other, which is sometimes a downside if done too rigidly.
  

A visual way to picture silo: imagine three columns of pages (Silo A, Silo B, Silo C). Pages in Column A interlink with each other a lot, but rarely link to Column B or C. 

Each has a top “category page” linking down to subpages, and subpages linking back up and sideways within the silo.

Some SEO experts like silo structures for ensuring a coherent thematic architecture. Others caution that overly strict silos (never linking between topics) can be unnatural – after all, some topics do relate. 

Modern approaches often blend silo with a more flexible hub-and-spoke model.

Hub-and-Spoke (Content Hub) Model

The hub-and-spoke model is a popular content strategy where you have a central “hub” (or pillar) content piece and multiple “spoke” pieces that branch off of it. 

The hub is usually a comprehensive guide on a broad topic, and spokes are detailed posts on subtopics. 

Internal linking is used to connect them heavily: the hub links out to each subtopic page, and each subtopic page links back to the hub (and sometimes to each other if relevant).

This is actually similar to a silo or content cluster, but usually hub-and-spoke is less strict about isolation. You might have multiple hubs that are interlinked if appropriate.

Example: Suppose your site is about digital marketing. You create a “Ultimate Guide to SEO” as a hub page. 

Then, you have individual articles like “Keyword Research 101”, “On-Page SEO Techniques”, “Link Building Strategies”, “SEO Audit Checklist” – those are the spokes, each diving deep into one aspect of SEO. 

All those spoke articles link back to the main SEO Guide (hub) saying “Learn more in our Guide Types of SEO,” etc. And the main guide lists and links all the sub-articles (“Read more about Technical SEO here.”).

This hub-and-spoke internal linking does a few things:

• It signals that the hub is the authoritative overview (since many pages link to it).
  
• It ensures someone interested in that topic can easily navigate between general info and specific info.
  e-commerce
• It helps search engines see the semantic grouping. If a user searches a broad term, the hub might rank; if they search a specific question, a spoke might rank, but Google still understands they’re part of a family of pages.
  

Hub-and-spoke is great for topical authority – it shows you didn’t just write one piece, you covered the topic from multiple angles. 

Internal links bind the hub and spokes, and sometimes even connect spokes to each other where appropriate (like the “Keyword Research 101” article might link to “Related Keywords vs LSI Keywords” article because they are closely related subtopics).

(Imagine a wheel: the hub is the center, spokes are connected to the center, and sometimes spokes might connect around the rim too.)

How Internal Linking Shapes the Crawl Path

From a crawler’s perspective, your internal link structure is your site structure. Crawlers will typically start at your homepage (or sitemap) and follow links.

They will discover your site in whatever order your internal links lead them. That’s why thoughtful internal linking can guide crawlers to give attention to certain pages sooner or more frequently.

This visual demonstrates how search engine crawlers navigate through internal links, starting from the Home Page, moving through multiple Pages, and following interconnections.

For example:

• If every page on your site links back to your homepage (which they usually do via a logo link), Google knows that’s an important central page (duh). But also, if your homepage links out to all your main sections, Google will quickly find those sections.
  
  
• If your homepage links directly to a few top blog posts, it might crawl those on every visit due to the prominent linkage.
  
  
• Conversely, if some pages are only accessible by following a very specific chain (Category > subcat > page > subpage), Google might crawl that subpage less often. But if you add an internal link to that subpage from a more frequently updated page, Google might reach it more.
  
  
• Also, search engines consider link distance when deciding crawl priority. A page that’s linked on the homepage is likely crawled often (maybe daily on a busy site). A page 5 links away might be crawled less often. By adjusting internal links, you can allocate your crawl budget more optimally, focusing Googlebot on what matters.
  
  

Avoiding crawl traps: 

Sometimes too many internal links (especially in things like faceted navigation or calendars) can lead crawlers into near-infinite loops or tons of low-value pages (like endless filtering combinations). 

A famous case was eBay’s 2014 issue, where they had an enormous number of links to things like outdated or duplicate pages. This wasted Google’s crawl budget and contributed to a big traffic drop. 

Google was spending time crawling useless pages and missing the important ones, plus it signaled low quality. 

The lesson: trim internal links that point to very low value or duplicate content (or noindex those pages) so that your crawl budget isn’t drained. 

Internal linking should guide crawlers to your best content, not swamp them in infinite links.

In summary, internal links dictate your site’s architecture:

• They can flatten a site (good for discovery).
  
  
• They can establish silos or hubs (good for topical organization).
  
  
• They guide crawlers and users along preferred paths.
  
  
• They form the “skeleton” on which your content “flesh” hangs.
  
  

A well-structured site with clear internal linking will feel intuitive, like a well-organized museum where exhibits of the same theme are in one room (with signs pointing to the next room), and a visitor (or Googlebot) can easily wander through without getting lost or hitting a dead end.

Next, we’ll discuss concrete best practices to execute internal linking effectively, and real examples to illustrate them.

Best Practices for Internal Linking (with Examples)

Now that we know why internal links matter and how they fit into your site’s structure, let’s get into the how. 

Here are some best practices to ensure your internal linking strategy is both user-friendly and SEO-friendly. We’ll go through each with examples:

Use Descriptive, Natural Anchor Text

Anchor text is the clickable text of a link. For internal links, always aim to use anchor text that describes what the target page is about – in a natural, non-spammy way. 

This helps users know what they’ll get if they click, and it gives Google context for the linked page’s content.

• Bad example: “For more information about our services, click here.” (Anchor text “click here” is vague – not good.)
  
  
• Good example: “Learn more about our digital marketing services in our detailed guide.” (Anchor text “digital marketing services” tells you exactly what to expect.)
  
  

Google actually recommends making anchor text descriptive, and this applies to internal links as well. 

For instance, if you have a page about e-commerce SEO, linking the words “e-commerce SEO” to that page is perfectly fine and clear. 

Just avoid overdoing exact-match keywords in a manipulative way. A little variety in phrasing is good (don’t link every time with the exact same words like a robot). Keep it natural and relevant in the sentence.

Why it matters: 

Descriptive anchors improve usability (people are more likely to click when they understand the link), and they help with SEO (the anchor acts like a keyword signal to the target page). 

Internal link anchors won’t usually trigger penalties like external links can, but if you use the exact same anchor text all over your site for a page, it might look odd or confuse Google about context. 

So mix it up – e.g., “digital marketing services”, “our marketing solutions”, “services for online marketing” could all point to the same page in different places. 

They’re all relevant and paint a broader semantic picture.

Example in action: 

On Wikipedia, if a term is important, it’s usually the anchor text to that term’s page. E.g., “The Amazon River is located in South America...” – “Amazon River” is the anchor linking to the Amazon River article. Simple and informative.

Link to Relevant and Valuable Content

When adding internal links, always ask: Is this link helpful to the reader? It should point them to something related that adds value. Don’t just shove links for SEO if they don’t make sense in context.

Relevance is key: If you have a page about “how to train puppies,” a link to your “buy our dog collars” page might not be directly relevant in the content (unless you find a logical way, like talking about leash training). 

But linking to another article on “housebreaking a puppy” or “best puppy food” could be very relevant. 

Google can detect topical relevance, and it certainly notices if users click a link and stick around. 

If people keep clicking your internal links because they find them relevant, that’s a positive sign.

Value to user: Link to pages that genuinely expand on or supplement the current page’s topic. 

For example, in a tutorial blog post, linking to another post that provides background knowledge or next steps is valuable. 

If you just randomly link to your homepage or an unrelated product page, users will be confused.

Avoid linking just for the sake of it: Every internal link is like a recommendation – you’re suggesting the user go there next. 

If they feel it’s not useful, they’ll ignore it (or worse, get annoyed). From an SEO view, irrelevant internal links might be ignored by Google too. They certainly won’t help establish clear topical clusters.

Example: Let’s say you run a tech blog. In an article about “Installing Windows 11 on a PC,” it would be smart to link a mention of “check your BIOS settings” to another article detailing how to access the BIOS.

That’s relevant and helpful. But linking “PC” to a generic PC category page or linking some random keyword like “Microsoft” to your post about Excel (just to drop a link) would not be logical to the reader.

Think contextually: “What would someone reading this likely want to know next?” Then link to that.

Prioritize Important Pages (PageRank Sculpting)

While the term “PageRank sculpting” often refers to old nofollow tactics (which we’ll discuss in Advanced strategies), here we mean intentionally funneling internal links to your most important pages to ensure they get enough love.

Not every page on your site is equally important. Your key pages might be your high-converting product pages, your cornerstone blog articles, your category pages, etc. 

You want to make sure those have a good number of internal links pointing to them, indicating their importance.

Site Navigation: Usually, your top pages will be in your navigation menu or homepage. That in itself gives them a lot of internal links (every page linking back to home, etc.). 

If a page is very important but not in the main nav, consider adding it if appropriate, or link it in your footer. 

For example, an ecommerce might feature “Top Deals” or “Best Sellers” on the homepage seasonally – those links boost those pages.

In-content linking: Whenever relevant, link to your money pages or top resources. If you have a blog, every new post is an opportunity to include internal links to some key pages. 

Let’s say you have an online course page that you want people to find. When writing a tutorial post that touches on that subject, you might say: “For a deeper dive, check out our [Online Course], which covers this topic in detail.” That’s an internal link to a high-value page.
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Leverage high-authority pages: Identify pages on your site that have garnered a lot of backlinks or traffic (perhaps via a tool or Search Console). Those pages have high link equity. Make sure those pages link out to other important pages on your site. 

This was Brian Dean’s tactic: he took his pages with the most external links and added internal links from them to new pages he wanted to rank. It’s like channeling the juice. 

A lot of sites forget to do this – they build backlinks to some blog post, but then that post doesn’t link to their product page that it’s related to. Don’t let that juice dead-end.
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Case in point: A SearchPilot experiment expanded a homepage’s footer to include more internal links to certain key pages, and it resulted in a 5% uplift in organic traffic to those pages. 

Even though footer links are at the bottom, adding them still passed some extra authority and visibility to pages that were previously not linked site-wide.

One caution: balance quantity. It’s good to have multiple internal links pointing to an important page (from various pages), but be mindful of anchor text cannibalization.

i.e., don’t use the exact same anchor text from every page to link to that one page, especially if the anchor is a keyword you target on multiple pages. Why? 

If two different pages are linked with the same anchor, Google might think they’re about the same thing and get confused which to rank. 

For instance, if you have two separate pages – one about “chocolate cookies” and one about “peanut cookies” – you wouldn’t link to both with anchor “cookie recipe” everywhere, or Google might mix them up. 

Use specific anchors (“chocolate cookie recipe” vs. “peanut cookie recipe”). So, prioritize pages, but also keep anchors specific to each page’s focus.

Maintain a Healthy Link Depth (3-Click Rule)

We covered this earlier, but as a best practice: try to keep important content within 3 clicks from your homepage or other major landing page. 

This is often called the “3-click rule,” suggesting a user shouldn’t have to click more than three times to find what they want.

• Conduct a quick test: From your homepage (or main menu), can you reach all the major sections in one click? Likely yes via menus. Now from those sections, can you reach the sub-items in another click? If some content is buried deeper, ask if you can surface it higher.
  
  
• Use breadcrumbs or additional links to shorten the path. Breadcrumb links allow one-click jump to higher category pages, effectively giving the user (and crawler) a shortcut upwards.
  
  
• For very deep content like archived posts, consider creating index pages or archive pages that link them out. For example, a “Blog Archive 2022” page that lists and links all posts from that year – now a post from Jan 2022 which was 5 clicks deep (through monthly archive pages) is just 2 clicks (Home > Archive 2022 > Post).
  
  

Crawl perspective: Google likely uses an internal metric similar to click depth as a factor for crawl scheduling. 

As noted, pages beyond a certain depth might not get crawled as often. By maintaining shallow depth with smart linking, you ensure even older or lower-level pages stay within reach.

User perspective: People get frustrated if they have to dig through too many menus. Often they just use the search function on the site or give up. 

Good internal links act like shortcuts or “see also” references that save them extra clicks. For instance, you might have a long-winded path via menus to reach a specific FAQ page, but if your homepage has a “Popular Questions” link directly to it, that’s one click. 

Or within a blog post, you link directly to a case study PDF that normally is under several menu layers.

So, audit your site’s link depth: an SEO crawler tool (like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb) can show you the “click depth” of each page. 

If you spot important pages at depth 4+, consider adding some internal links from higher-level pages to them.

Avoid Link Over-Optimization

Internal links are under your control, which is good – but it also means you have to be careful not to overdo it. What does over-optimizing internal links look like?

Too Many Links on one page: If every other word in your paragraph is a link, that’s overwhelming. 

Google can crawl a lot of links, but there comes a point where adding more links doesn’t add value and might even dilute the value of each link. 

Google used to recommend keeping a page’s total links to under 100 in the old days. While modern sites often exceed that (especially with nav menus, footers, etc.), the spirit remains: don’t throw in hundreds of internal links randomly. 

A study found performance benefits reverse after ~50 internal links on a page – beyond that, additional links might not help and could even hurt by splitting attention and PageRank too thin. 

Quality over quantity: it’s better to have a smaller number of highly relevant links than to flood the page with every link possible.

Repetitive Anchor Text: If you use the exact same anchor text every time you link to a page, especially if it’s stuffed with keywords, that can look spammy. 

For example, if you have an internal link to your “best credit cards 2025” page, using that full keyword every single time 20 times in an article is overkill. 

Vary it a bit (“best credit cards”, “top credit card picks”, “see our 2025 credit card list”). It reads better and covers more semantic ground. 

Also, do not use the same anchor text to link to two different pages (as mentioned earlier) – that confuses Google. Each page should have its own distinct set of anchor variations.

Irrelevant or Forced Links: Don’t link things that aren’t related just to create a link. 

For example, within an article about gardening, randomly linking the word “marketing” to your digital marketing services page is jarring and clearly just for SEO – it doesn’t belong, and users won’t click it. 

Google’s algorithms likely discount such links, and if a human reviewer saw it, they’d consider it a poor user experience. 

Make your links contextually relevant – that’s optimization done right, versus optimization done wrong (which is linking for some perceived SEO benefit with no user logic).

Site-wide footer links with exact keywords: Some sites used to put lots of keyword-rich links in footers to try to rank other pages. 

E.g., every page’s footer has a block “Popular searches: cheap NYC apartments, NYC rent deals, Manhattan cheap apartments” each linking to some page. 

Google is quite good at spotting such patterns and might ignore or even penalize if it looks deceptive. It’s fine to have footer links, just ensure they’re genuinely useful navigation, not a keyword stuffing exercise.

Remember, internal linking is part of your site content. So all the rules of good content apply: make it useful, natural, and varied. If you wouldn’t do something in normal writing for a user, don’t do it just for SEO.

Consistent Navigation and Breadcrumbs

To round out best practices, let’s talk about the more structural linking in navigation and breadcrumbs:

Consistent Navigation: Your main menu (and any sidebars) should be consistent across pages (usually). 

This consistency means every page is, for example, three clicks from home (home > section > subsection page) in the same way. 

It also ensures important top pages always have one internal link from every page (like your homepage gets linked via the logo, main sections via the menu). 

Consistent nav links make the user experience smooth (users know where to find the menu on each page) and also uniformly distributes link equity to those key pages across the site.

One caveat: Your nav might cause some unimportant pages to get a lot of internal links (like Contact Us might be linked on every page). 

That’s okay and often unavoidable; it’s more important for usability. Google expects that (and typically those pages aren’t ones you need to rank for competitive terms anyway). 

In fact, in Google Search Console’s “Internal Links” report, you’ll often see your About or Contact page as most linked because of navigation. 

Brian Dean noted this for his site – many internal links pointed to less SEO-important pages due to nav, and that’s just something to live with. The takeaway: don’t stress if nav links inflate some counts; focus on whether your nav is helping users get to key content.

Breadcrumbs: If your site structure has multiple levels, breadcrumbs are highly recommended. They provide a secondary navigation that shows the path. 

For example: Home > Electronics > Televisions > 4K Ultra HD TV X. Each of those should be a link (except the current page). 

Breadcrumb links not only help users jump to a broader category easily, but also send signals to Google about hierarchy. 

Google may even use breadcrumb markup to display breadcrumb trails in search results, which is nice.

Ensure your breadcrumb links accurately reflect the site structure (don’t put misleading categories). 

Also, include structured data (schema) for breadcrumbs if you can, as Google looks for that. But note: Breadcrumb links supplement, not replace, other internal links. They are typically at top-of-page, small, and mostly for structural nav. You should still liberally use contextual links within content as we discussed.

HTML Sitemap/Footer Site Links: Some websites, especially older or very large ones, maintain an HTML sitemap page that links to many pages on the site, categorized. If kept updated, that can serve as a crawlable index of your site (like an archive page). 

It’s not as crucial today if you have a good architecture and an XML sitemap for search engines, but an HTML sitemap linked in the footer is another way to ensure no page is orphaned. 

Just be careful: linking every page of a huge site on one page can be unwieldy. It might be better to break it into sections.
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User Expectations: Make your navigation labels clear (and match the target pages). For example, if your menu says “Blog”, it should link to your blog homepage, not suddenly to an external site or something. 

Any internal link in nav or breadcrumbs should do what it says. Consistency builds trust – a user who finds the navigation easy to use will explore more pages.

By following these best practices – descriptive anchors, relevant linking, focusing on important pages, shallow link depth, avoiding spammy patterns, and maintaining strong navigational links – you set a solid foundation. 

But we can take internal linking even further with some advanced strategies, which we’ll explore next.

Advanced Internal Linking Strategies

Ready to level up? Once you’ve covered the basics, there are advanced techniques and concepts in internal linking that can give you an extra edge. 

These involve strategic thinking about how internal links can reinforce SEO themes, how to handle certain technical situations, and using modern tools to optimize your linking. Let’s explore some advanced strategies:

Internal Linking for Topical Clusters

We mentioned the hub-and-spoke model earlier – this falls under the idea of topical clusters. In advanced practice, building out topical clusters is a deliberate content and internal linking strategy.

Pillar and Supporting Content: Identify the main “pillar” pages for each key topic on your site. Then identify supporting pages (or create them if needed) that cover subtopics or related questions. 

Ensure every supporting page links to the pillar (usually prominently, like in the intro or conclusion: “For a comprehensive overview, see our [Main Guide]”). 

Also link between supporting pages where it makes sense (because subtopics often interrelate). The pillar page should also have a section where it links out to all the subtopics (like a mini-TOC with blurbs).

Semantic Relevance: Use internal links to emphasize semantic connections. If a subtopic is part of a broader concept, linking it to the broad page (with relevant anchor) is like telling Google “this is under that umbrella.” 

For example, say you run a cooking site with a pillar page on “Baking Basics.” A supporting article on “How to Bake Perfect Muffins” should link to “Baking Basics” (maybe anchor “baking techniques”), and the Baking page might list muffins as one of the items.
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Topical Depth Boost: Internal links in clusters can help all pages in the cluster rank better. Why? Because Google might evaluate topical authority by looking at the cluster as a whole. 

If your pages about “SEO” all link together, Google sees a strong network. In fact, one SEO case study showed that adding internal links in a content cluster improved the rankings of a key landing page significantly (Typeform’s internal linking helped a landing page jump to #2, for example). 

This is likely because the internal links reinforced the topical focus and distributed link equity among them.

Anchor text variety within cluster: When linking within a cluster, you can use related terms as anchors to create a semantic net. 

For instance, linking to your pillar “Digital Marketing 101” page with anchors like “digital marketing basics”, “online marketing guide”, “learn digital marketing” across different supporting posts covers various ways someone might refer to it. This broadens the relevance.
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The advanced part here is planning: you might map out your clusters in advance on a spreadsheet or diagram. Ensure no important piece is left unlinked. 

Every new piece of content, ask: which cluster can this link to? Perhaps you even tag content by cluster and regularly audit internal links to see if all cluster links are in place.

The payoff is a robust site where, if one page in a cluster does well, it can lift the others (via internal referrals and shared authority). 

It also means if Google finds one of your cluster pages, it effectively finds them all (since they’re interlinked), which is great for crawl efficiency.

Internal Link Sculpting with NoFollow (Outdated vs Modern View)

This is a bit technical/historical. PageRank sculpting was an old practice where SEOs would add rel="nofollow" to some internal links to control the flow of PageRank. 

For example, they would nofollow links to trivial pages (like “Login” or “Terms of Service”), hoping that the PageRank that would have gone to those links would instead concentrate on the remaining followed links.

However, this strategy is now outdated and not effective. Google changed how nofollow works internally. 

Today, if you nofollow an internal link, the PageRank that would have gone to that link doesn’t magically get redistributed to others – it basically evaporates. 

So you lose that little bit of link equity instead of saving it.

In other words, adding nofollow to internal links hurts more than it helps, because you might be preventing a crawler from discovering a page or passing any juice to it, without benefiting other pages. 

Matt Cutts from Google years ago confirmed that nofollowed links still count in dividing PageRank, they just don’t transmit it further.

Modern view: Use nofollow on internal links only in special cases, like if you truly don’t want Google to count a link to a page (maybe a user-generated profile page or something). 

But even then, it’s often better to just allow it but mark it noindex if needed. Most experts say do not nofollow your own internal links as a “sculpting” method. It’s generally counterproductive and can look like trying to manipulate.

Better approach: Instead of no-follow internal links to control flow, control flow by architecture. 

E.g., if you don’t want a low-value page getting a ton of link equity, don’t link to it from every high-level page. 

Perhaps link it only from a relevant section or archive. Or if it’s truly not important (like a thank-you page), you can noindex it and maybe not link to it at all except when necessary (like after a form submission redirect).

One legitimate use: some sites nofollow internal links that might be crawl traps (like a search results page on the site or infinite calendar). 

But a better solution is actually to block those via robots.txt or use noindex on them, as Google might still crawl nofollow links as hints nowadays.

So the advanced advice: Don’t waste time trying to sculpt PageRank with nofollows internally. 

Focus on positive strategies (linking where value is) rather than trying to hide parts of your site’s link graph. If you have to resort to nofollow for internal links, reevaluate if that content should exist or be accessible in the first place.

Using Internal Links for Conversion Funnel Optimization

Internal links aren’t just for SEO – you can use them strategically to guide users toward your conversion goals. 

This blends into UX and conversion rate optimization, but it’s worth including because it’s a smart usage of internal linking beyond just ranking.

Think about your conversion funnel: Awareness -> Interest -> Desire -> Action. Different pages sit at different stages. You can use internal links to move people down the funnel:

• From informational content (blog posts, guides) to commercial content (product pages, service pages, sign-up pages).
  
  
• From product pages to checkout or inquiry pages.
  
  
• From one stage of a tutorial to the next step where you offer a product that solves a problem.
  
  

Examples:

• A blog post discussing “10 Tips to Secure Your Home” might naturally mention at tip #5 something like, “Use a reliable home security system.” That phrase could link to your product page for your home security system or a landing page for a demo. It’s relevant (fits the content) and it gently nudges the reader that “hey, we have a solution for this”.
  
  
• An e-commerce category page might have a banner or link: “Not sure what you need? Take our quiz” which goes to an interactive tool (internal page) that then recommends products (and links back to them).
  
  
• A software documentation page might link “See pricing options” or “Ready to upgrade?” within or at the end of the doc, leading to the pricing page or upgrade page.
  
  

The idea is to anticipate the user’s journey. If they’re reading X, what might they want next if they’re convinced? Provide that link.

Make it prominent when appropriate: Internal links for conversion can be CTA-style (call-to-action buttons are essentially internal links too). 

For SEO content, you can mix natural internal links with more obvious CTA links. Just remember to use proper anchor or button labels (“Sign me up for X” or “Get the free trial”) – those are still internal links but often styled as buttons.

From the SEO perspective, doing this also ensures that even your sales pages are integrated into the site’s link graph, not isolated. 

Sometimes sites have a “marketing site” and a “blog” and they’re barely interlinked – that’s a missed opportunity. Use the authority your content builds to boost your money pages through user flow and link equity.

One stat: Users coming from internal recommendations often have higher conversion intent because they’ve engaged with your content longer. 

While I don’t have a specific percentage on hand, think of your own behavior: if you click an internal link like “Try it free” after reading about a product’s benefits, you’re quite far along in interest.

So, advanced linking isn’t just about SEO juice – it’s also about strategically placing links to drive outcomes. Always think both like a crawler and a user.

AI + NLP Tools for Internal Link Suggestions

As sites grow, manually managing internal links can be daunting. This is where modern tools using AI and NLP (Natural Language Processing) can help.

Content Analysis Tools: Some SEO platforms (like Yoast for WordPress, for example) analyze your content and suggest relevant posts to link to. 

They might see you mentioned “link building” in a post and pop up a suggestion: “You have another article about link building, consider linking to it.” 

These suggestions use keyword matching or even semantic analysis to find connections you might have forgotten about.

Link Suggestion Plugins: For WordPress, there are plugins like Link Whisper (which was listed in our tools section) that use AI to automatically recommend internal links while you write. 

It can save time by highlighting phrases and suggesting URLs from your site that fit. Some can even auto-add links if you approve them, speeding up the interlinking process.

NLP for context: More advanced systems might cluster your content by topic using AI and tell you “these 5 posts are about similar subtopics, ensure they’re interlinked.” 

This is great for large sites where one author might not know what another author wrote last year that’s related.

Internal Link Audit Tools: There are tools (like some features in Ahrefs, SEMrush, or seoClarity’s Link Advisor) that can show pages with few internal links (potentially orphans) and recommend pages that should link to them based on similar keywords. 

For example, Ahrefs has a “Link Opportunities” report that picks up on cases like “Page A mentions the keyword that Page B is about – maybe link A -> B.”

Dynamic linking with AI: Some newer content management systems might start doing on-the-fly internal linking. 

Imagine an AI that, for each user or each context, picks related content to show. (This edges into the next point about dynamic linking too.)

Using these tools doesn’t replace human judgment (you should verify the suggestions make sense) but can massively improve efficiency and ensure you don’t miss linking opportunities in a big site.

Pro tip: Even without fancy tools, you can use Google’s site search as a DIY internal link suggestion tool. 

For example, if you have a new article about “machine learning trends”, you can Google site:yourdomain.com "machine learning" to find where you mentioned that term in older posts. Those are candidates to link from (update the old posts to link to your new one). 

I am also doing this to quickly find internal link opportunities for new content.

By leveraging AI suggestions, you keep your internal linking continuously improving, especially as new content is added. 

It’s like having a helper that reads your entire site and says “hey, this new page would really fit well with that older page, link them up.”

Dynamic Internal Linking (Based on Behavior or Tags)

Dynamic internal linking means the links on a page could change based on certain conditions, rather than being static for all users. 

This is an advanced concept often seen in personalized or content-heavy websites.

Examples:

• Behavior-based recommendations: Many news sites or content platforms show “Recommended for you” internal links, which are tailored to the user’s reading history. If you often read sports articles, the homepage might show you more sports internal links. These are internal links that vary user to user, aiming to increase engagement by personal interest.
  
  
• Contextual related content blocks: Instead of hard-coding “related posts”, some sites use algorithms that fetch related content dynamically. They might base it on tags or categories or even on content similarity via NLP. For instance, an article might have a “You may also like” section that is generated on the fly using an algorithm (like “other users who read this also read X”).
  
  
• Seasonal or time-based internal links: A site’s homepage might dynamically surface different internal links depending on time (e.g., an e-commerce site shows “Back to School Deals” links in August, then swaps to “Holiday Gifts” links in December). While this is manual to set, it’s dynamic in that it changes with time or campaign.
  
  
• A/B testing internal links: Some advanced marketers might A/B test different internal link placements or anchor texts to see what gets more clicks or improves conversion, and then dynamically roll out the winner.
  
  

From an SEO standpoint, dynamic internal links are fine as long as they’re still crawlable in some way. Google won’t get a “personalized” view, it will probably see one version (like a generic “recommended” set). 

As long as all those items get linked somewhere, it’s okay. But one challenge: if links are highly personalized, Google might not see certain link connections because it doesn’t have a “history” or profile like a user. 

A solution is to ensure a baseline set of related links exists for crawler or for first-time visitors, etc.

Dynamic linking shines for user engagement. Think of how YouTube keeps you hooked with “Up Next” videos – that’s an internal link (video to video) chosen algorithmically. 

You can replicate that concept on your site with “next article” or “people also read” features. It requires some coding or a plugin that tracks user behavior or uses a recommendation engine.

Important: Always ensure that even dynamic links respect relevancy. A fancy algorithm that suggests unrelated content could do more harm than good. If you implement such features, monitor them to ensure they’re actually suggesting sensible content.

To recap advanced strategies: build strong topical clusters with thoughtful linking, don’t bother with internal nofollow sculpting (it’s outdated), use internal links to push users toward conversions, let tools powered by AI help identify linking opportunities, and consider dynamic/personalized linking to boost user engagement. 

Mastering these can give you a serious competitive advantage in SEO and user retention – things SEO experts love to see.

Next, we’ll touch on some technical considerations to keep in mind with internal linking, because the best strategy can be foiled by technical issues if not handled correctly.

Technical Considerations

Internal linking has a technical side too. You want to make sure your links are implemented in a way that search engines can crawl and that you’re not inadvertently harming your site’s SEO through broken or misconfigured links. 

Let’s go through some important technical considerations:

Internal Links in JavaScript or React-based Sites

Many modern websites use JavaScript frameworks (like React, Angular, Vue) that build content dynamically in the browser. 

Sometimes links aren’t traditional <a href> elements, but are handled by scripts or custom components (e.g., a single-page application using a <Link> component that doesn’t render a normal anchor tag).

Key point: Google can crawl JavaScript links if they are proper anchor elements with an href, even if inserted dynamically. 

But if your links are not standard or rely on click events, Google might not reliably crawl them.

• Ensure that internal links are in the HTML or get added to the DOM in a way Google’s crawler can see after rendering. Google does render JS, but it does it on a second wave (which can be delayed).
  
  
• Avoid using things like <span onclick="..."> as a link or solely relying on script to navigate. For example, a React site might use something like <a onClick={navigate('/page')}>Go</a> without an href. Google may not follow that because there’s no href. The correct approach would be <a href="/page" onClick={...}>Go</a> so there is an actual href URL.
  
  
• If using a JS framework’s router (like React Router which might use <Link to="/page">), check what it outputs. Ideally it outputs a real <a href="/page">.
  
  
• According to Google’s own documentation, using JavaScript to insert <a href> links dynamically is okay, as long as it’s the proper markup. They specifically say they can crawl those.
  
  
• On the other hand, custom attributes (like routerLink or ng-click) are not understood by Google’s crawler. So a link like <a routerLink="/products">Products</a> might be ignored because Google doesn’t know what routerLink means. The fix is to output a regular href.
  
  

Bottom line: if your site uses a lot of JS, test your internal links as Google sees them. Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test or Rich Results test (which shows a rendered HTML) or the URL Inspection tool in Search Console. See if the links appear. If not, you may need to adjust to server-side rendering or add fallback <a> links.

Another aspect: sometimes infinite scroll or certain interactive elements might load links on the fly. Google might not trigger infinite scroll, so those deeper links might not be found. Provide a paginated path or a “view all” that is crawlable.

Case example: There was a known case where some JS-heavy websites had their internal navigation hidden behind scripts and Google indexed only their homepage because it couldn’t find links. Make sure not to fall into that trap. If in doubt, having an XML sitemap listing URLs can help Google find them even if internal link crawling is iffy, but ideally fix the links themselves.

Crawl Budget Optimization

For huge sites (thousands or millions of pages), Google’s crawl budget (the number of pages it crawls per day) becomes a tangible concern. Internal linking can affect how that budget is spent:

If you link to a ton of low-value pages (e.g., faceted filters, endless calendar pages, session ID pages, etc.), Googlebot might waste its limited crawl hits on those, and not get to your important pages as often. 

The eBay example we discussed is a classic: they had massive linking to every product variation and stale pages, which consumed crawl budget and hurt SEO.

You want to steer crawlers towards your updated, important content. This might mean noindexing or removing internal links to pages that don’t need frequent crawling. 

For instance, if you have a calendar of events, you probably don’t need to link every date. Or if you have faceted combinations (like a clothing site with filters for each size/color combo), maybe don’t internally link every combination – use a more selective linking or an AJAX load for some.

Use internal linking to prioritize: frequently updated sections should be linked prominently (so Google checks them often). Sections that rarely change can be a bit more buried.

Broken links and redirect chains waste crawl budget too. If Google tries to crawl an internal link that 404s, that’s a hit wasted (and it may come back to check again). 

If an internal link goes through a 301 redirect to the final page, Google has to request two URLs instead of one – doing that at scale means a lot of extra crawling. 

We’ll discuss fixing those in a moment, but keep in mind: clean up dead links and update redirected links to point directly.

Robots.txt and internal links: If you have sections blocked by robots.txt, don’t link to them widely. Google will still see the link and try to request (and get blocked), which again is wasteful. 

For instance, if /admin/ is blocked, don’t have a site-wide link to /admin/login – use meta noindex on the page or just don’t link it publicly.

This is a fine-tuning thing. Medium-sized sites might not worry; Google will crawl fine. But big sites (100k+ pages) should definitely audit internal link structure for crawl traps.

Think of your crawl budget as a limited number of “Googlebot hours.” Internal linking is how you schedule those hours efficiently.

Avoiding Broken Internal Links (404s)

Broken links are frustrating to users and can be harmful to SEO if important pages are affected (plus they waste that crawl budget as noted).

An internal broken link is when you link to a URL that returns a 404 Not Found (or some error). Common causes: you deleted or moved a page and didn’t update older links, or a typo in the URL, or perhaps dynamic links that generate a bad URL.

Best practices:

• Run periodic crawls (using Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, etc.) to detect any internal 404s. Or use Search Console which will often list pages not found (some may be from internal links).
  
  
• Fix them by updating the links to the correct URL. If the page is gone and not coming back, remove the link or change it to point to a relevant alternative.
  
  
• If you moved a page (and set up a redirect), update the internal links to the new URL instead of relying on the redirect.
  
  
• If you find a chunk of pages went 404 (maybe an entire section removed), do a search-and-replace or some systematic update in your content to remove those references.
  
  

In fact, 42% of websites have broken internal links on them – which is almost half. So you can stand out by simply having a squeaky clean site with no dead-ends.

From an SEO perspective, a few 404s won’t tank you, but they degrade the quality of user experience and could cause loss of link equity if any internal link juice was heading that way and the page is gone. 

It’s like having a road on your site map that leads to nowhere – better to either pave it to a new destination or close it off.

Canonicals vs Internal Links: How They Interplay

Canonical tags are a way to tell Google “if there are duplicates or variants of this content, this URL is the one that represents the content.” 

Sometimes there’s a tension between canonicals and internal links if not aligned.

Link to the canonical version: As a rule, your internal links should point to the canonical (preferred) URL of a page. 

If pageA is the main one and pageA?ref=123 is just a tracking variant, don’t internally link the variant. Link pageA. If you have http vs https or non-www vs www issues, fix those so you’re consistently linking the right one.

If you have separate mobile URLs or something (m.domain.com vs www), generally you’d use different link sets for mobile vs desktop. 

But nowadays most use responsive design, so not an issue.

Confusing signals: If your site has multiple URLs for the same content (like an article accessible under two categories with different URLs), and you set a canonical to one of them, try to have internal links go to that one primarily. 

If half your site links version A and half links version B, and you canonical B to A, Google might still sometimes index B if confused. Unity helps.

Orphan vs canonical: If you canonicalize a page to another, you basically tell Google not to index it. So internal linking to a non-canonical page is mostly wasted. 

E.g., suppose you have two similar product pages and you canonical one to the other (because they’re duplicates). 

If you keep linking to the one that is canonicalized away, those links aren’t helping it (since it won’t be indexed) and any PageRank they pass might just end up at the canonical target eventually (if Google even follows them). 

It’s cleaner to update your internal links to point directly to the canonical target page.

Use canonicals to complement linking: For example, on an e-commerce site with pagination or sorting, you might noindex or canonical those pages to page 1. 

Then you’d avoid internally linking to page 2, 3, etc. aside from the necessary “next” links. The canonicals handle duplication, and you minimize links to duplicated content so you’re not sending mixed signals.

In short, canonicals and internal links should tell the same story. Internal links indicate which pages you deem important, and canonicals indicate which URLs are authoritative for content. Align them so both are pointing to the same URLs as primary.

If internal links and canonical tags conflict (say you link a lot to a URL that has a canonical tag pointing elsewhere), you might confuse crawlers. 

They’ll follow the link, then see canonical and maybe not index that page. It’s not catastrophic, but it’s inefficient. Better to link directly to the canonical page itself.

Structured Data & Breadcrumb Markup

We touched on breadcrumbs in best practices, but from a technical angle:

• Implementing BreadcrumbList schema is a nice add-on. It allows Google to display your breadcrumb links in the search snippet (instead of showing a long URL path).
  
  
• Ensure the breadcrumb links in the HTML match the structured data. Inconsistency could confuse crawlers. E.g., don’t have breadcrumb text “Home > Blog > Post” but your structured data says something else.
  
  
• Site Links in Google: Those indented site links you see for some results (like when you search a brand and get main site plus several subpage links) – internal linking and a clear structure help with that. Google decides those, but a well-structured navigation increases your chances.
  
  
• Other structured data tied to internal linking: Not directly internal linking, but things like sitelinks search box schema or RelatedItems schema could involve links to other internal pages. For instance, a FAQ or Q&A schema might link to an internal answer page.
  
  
• Ensure technical health: heavy use of JavaScript shouldn’t break the structured data or make it disappear.
  
  

One more technical note: Redirects – always update internal links to point to the current URL. For example, if /old-page now redirects to /new-page, update any links still pointing to /old-page to point to /new-page directly. 

It’s cleaner and saves a redirect hop. A single 301 isn’t a big deal SEO-wise, but it’s better practice, and if you have chains (A->B->C) definitely clean those up to go A->C.

Summary of technical part: Use proper anchor elements especially in JS frameworks, channel Google to important areas by avoiding linking to junk, fix your broken/redirected links, and make sure your internal linking strategy works hand-in-hand with things like canonical tags and structured navigation markup.

A technically sound site ensures all the strategic linking work you did isn’t lost on the crawler.

Alright, we’ve covered a ton! Next, we’ll list some useful tools that can help analyze and optimize internal links, and then common mistakes to avoid (some we’ve touched on, but we’ll summarize them in one place).

Tools for Internal Link Analysis

Managing and auditing internal links can be much easier with the right tools. Here are some popular ones that SEO experts often use, and how they can help you:

Screaming Frog SEO Spider: This is a desktop program that crawls your site like a search engine would. It’s excellent for internal link analysis. 

It will show you a list of all your pages, how many internal links each has coming in and going out, the anchor text of those links, the click depth of each page, and so on. 

You can easily spot pages with zero internal links (orphans) or very few links, and find broken links. Screaming Frog even has a visualization feature to see your site structure graph. 

Example use: Run a crawl, then filter for “Response Codes = 404” to see any broken link URLs and find out which pages link to them to fix them. 

You can also see the “Site Structure” tab to identify if any page is beyond 3 clicks deep, etc. It’s like X-ray goggles for your site’s link web.

Google Search Console (Links report): In GSC, under Links, there’s a section for “Internal Links” which shows the top linked pages on your site (by number of internal links pointing to them). 

This can reveal interesting things, like which pages your navigation emphasizes. If you see your policy pages are the top linked, that’s expected due to nav, but you can scroll and ensure your top content pages also have a healthy number. 

GSC won’t show the full link graph or broken links, but it’s a nice sanity check and it’s free. Another GSC feature: the Index Coverage report might show if some pages aren’t indexed (which could hint they’re not linked well), and URL Inspection can show incoming links (internal and external) for a specific page.

Ahrefs / SEMrush (Internal link analysis): These SEO suites have site audit and site explorer tools. For instance, Ahrefs Site Audit can list internal link opportunities or issues. 

Ahrefs also in its Site Explorer shows for any given page, the internal backlinks (with anchor text) pointing to it. 

That’s useful if you want to see “what links do I already have pointing to page X, and are they from high authority pages?”. 

SEMrush Site Audit has an internal linking section that might highlight if some pages have too few or too many links, or if there’s orphan pages (they have a specific Orphan Pages report). These tools also often integrate with their recommendations: e.g., SEMrush might say “Page A has no internal links – consider adding some from relevant pages.” They sometimes even identify which relevant pages could link (like using keyword similarity).

Link Whisper (WordPress plugin): Mentioned earlier, Link Whisper helps you add internal links as you write content. It scans your site and suggests sentences where you could add a link. 

It also provides reporting: you can see number of internal links each post has and quickly add more. This is more of a proactive tool (building links) rather than analysis, but it does help ensure no post is left orphaned by alerting you if a post has few inbound internal links.

Sitebulb: Similar to Screaming Frog but with a more GUI approach and lots of built-in hints. 

It can produce a crawl map visualization, show internal link distribution, highlight click depth issues, and even integrate some PageRank flow calculations (some tools simulate “link equity” distribution which can be interesting to identify if maybe one section is soaking up too much or too little). 

Sitebulb also flags things like redirect chains, broken links, non-anchor links, etc., with nice visuals.

seoClarity Link Analyzer (enterprise level): Tools like seoClarity have advanced link analysis for huge sites. They even have AI “Link Seeker” as mentioned in an earlier case study that can automatically insert internal links at scale. 

Enterprise tools can handle millions of pages, but for a typical SEO expert, Screaming Frog or a cloud crawler like DeepCrawl are often enough.

Browser extensions (for quick checks): There are simple Chrome extensions like “Check My Links” which highlight broken links on a page, or “Link Redirect Trace” to click on a link and see if it goes through redirects. These can be handy when editing a specific page.

Using these tools, you can maintain an internal linking checklist:

1. Crawl for broken links and fix them.
   
   
2. Identify low-linked pages and add links to them.
   
   
3. Check that important pages have a good number of internal links (>5 is a rough rule, but depends on site size) – as a quick rule, your top 10 money pages should have many internal links from various sections.
   
   
4. Ensure no page is more than e.g. 3 clicks deep for important ones.
   
   
5. Visualize the structure – does it match what you think it is? Are all categories interconnected logically?
   
   

Many of these tasks can be done periodically (monthly or quarterly internal link audit is great practice). 

Some experts even include internal link optimization as part of publishing workflow: whenever a new page is published, they immediately add a few internal links to it from older pages (ensuring it’s not orphaned on day one).

So these tools save time and provide data to refine your strategy. They’re like your diagnostics kit to keep the circulatory system of your website (its internal links) healthy and flowing.

Next up, we’ll highlight common mistakes to avoid in internal linking, many of which you’ll already recognize, but it’s good to have a checklist of “don’ts”.

Common Internal Linking Mistakes to Avoid

Even well-intentioned SEO experts can slip into some pitfalls with internal linking. Here are some common mistakes and misconceptions, so you can steer clear of them:

Too Many Links on a Single Page

While internal links are good, you can overdo it. If a page has hundreds of links, it can overwhelm users and possibly dilute the SEO value of each link. 

Google’s earlier guidelines advised a reasonable number (around 100) of links per page as a rule of thumb – and that includes all navigation, footer, etc. Now, it’s not a hard limit, but the spirit is: don’t throw everything in the kitchen sink as a link on one page.

Why it’s bad: Users won’t know where to click if confronted with a link-farm page. And from a crawler perspective, a page with thousands of links might not pass much equity on each, and Google might even choose not to follow all if deemed excessive. 

There’s evidence that after a certain point, adding more links gives diminishing returns or even negative effects.

For instance, imagine an article that has a link on almost every word – it’s distracting and spammy. Or a footer that lists 50 tags on every page – that’s probably not helpful (tag clouds fell out of favor for this reason).

Avoid: Only link where it makes sense. If you find yourself listing 20 “related posts”, pare it down to the 5 most relevant. 

If you have 3 different navigation menus plus breadcrumb plus related plus footer links – consider user experience, maybe consolidate some.

Repetitive Use of Same Anchor Text

Using the identical anchor text every time for a particular page (or worse, for different pages) is a mistake. It feels unnatural and could confuse search engines.

Why avoid identical anchors for different pages: As mentioned before, if two different pages are both linked as “best coffee maker”, Google might think both pages are about best coffee makers and not be sure which is the main one. This is anchor text cannibalization.

Why vary anchors: Even for one page, varying the anchor phrasing slightly can capture more semantic signals. 

Also, if all 100 internal links to your product page use the exact same keyword anchor, it’s a bit over-optimized. Google might not penalize that like they would external links, but you lose out on the chance to rank for longer phrases or related terms.

Avoid: Don’t copy-paste the same anchor text everywhere without considering context. Keep anchors relevant but organically worded for each placement. If your content naturally uses synonyms or variations, use those.

Also, do not use generic anchors repeatedly like “Click here” – that tells Google nothing (and isn’t great for accessibility either). 

It’s fine occasionally (“Learn more here”) but it should be obvious what “here” is referencing from context.

Orphan Pages Without Incoming Links

This is a biggie – an orphan page is essentially invisible as we discussed. It’s a mistake to publish content and not link to it from anywhere in your site’s main content.

Why it happens: Sometimes people publish a landing page and only link it in a sitemap or expect it to rank magically or use PPC to drive traffic. But for SEO, if it’s orphaned, it’s not sharing in your site’s authority network.

Avoid: Every important page should have at least one (preferably multiple) internal links pointing to it. A quick check is using the search operator or tools to find internal references. If none, go and add them from logically related pages.

Remember, 25% of pages have zero internal links pointing to them on many sites. That’s a quarter of content potentially wasted from an SEO perspective. Don’t let your hard-written pages languish unlinked.

Redirect Chains in Internal Paths

A redirect chain is when an internal link doesn’t go directly to the destination but passes through one or more redirects. 

Example: Page A links to Page B (old URL), which 301 redirects to Page C (new URL). If you have a lot of these, it’s inefficient.

Why it’s bad: It slows down users (two HTTP requests instead of one), and although Google will eventually get to C, you lose a bit of PageRank through each 301 (some say a tiny bit is lost, but not much – still, not ideal). If the chain is longer (A->B->C->D) you risk Google giving up or delaying index of D.

Avoid: Regularly audit for redirects and update the links to point to the final URL. If you moved a bunch of pages after a site redesign, make that cleanup part of the process. Some tools can specifically report “redirect chains” or “redirect loops” from internal links.

If for some reason you know a URL will change often (maybe seasonal pages), consider using a consistent URL and just change content, or plan to update links via an include or script globally.

The SearchPilot study in our earlier content showed that fixing internal links to point directly to final URLs (removing intermediate 301s) improved crawl efficiency and user experience. It’s a “hidden” technical SEO fix that can yield benefits.

Linking to Irrelevant or Outdated Content

Every internal link kind of vouches for the content it links. If you’re linking to an outdated piece or something off-topic, it’s not good for user trust or site quality.

Irrelevant linking: E.g., a link from a car review page to a recipe page (with no context) just because you have that page and want to give it traffic. 

This might confuse users (“why would I click that?”) and Google likely ignores irrelevant links anyway in terms of context passing.

Outdated content: Maybe you wrote “Top 10 SEO Tips for 2015” – by now it’s old. If you still link it all over, users might bounce seeing it’s outdated. Either update that content or link newer stuff. Internally linking to stale pages isn’t great (unless historical archive is needed). 

It’s often better to guide people to your fresher content. Plus, if that outdated page isn’t performing, you might even consider removing or merging it and redirecting.

Thin content networks: Some tried to create lots of thin pages and heavily interlink them in hopes of ranking (like a private blog network within a site). 

Google is good at identifying thin content and if you interlink junk pages too much, you could get hit by quality algorithms. So always focus on linking pages that provide real value.

Avoid: periodically review your links (especially those manually curated like in sidebars or older posts) – are they still pointing to live, relevant pages? Remove ones that are not useful. Also avoid linking in ways that appear manipulative (like footer links with keyword-rich text to some old doorway page).

(Additional mistakes)

Though not in the sub-list, a couple more mistakes to note:

• Not updating internal links after site restructure: People do site redesigns and change URL structure, and if they don’t update all internal links, some break or redirect. Always update internal references during migrations.
  
  
• Case sensitivity and trailing slashes: On some servers, /Page1 and /page1 might be different or one 404s. Make sure all internal links use consistent casing and trailing slash format to avoid unintended 404s or duplicates.
  
  
• Overusing nofollow internally: As we covered, adding nofollow on your own links is a mistake under outdated knowledge. Generally avoid that (except extreme cases).
  
  
• Not linking deeper pages at all: Sometimes sites only link at category level and assume that’s enough (like archive pagination with no in-content links to specific articles). If a page is very important, mention it in other content rather than just leaving it only accessible via category page page 5.
  
  

By avoiding these mistakes, you’ll ensure your internal linking strategy remains strong and doesn’t inadvertently hurt your SEO or user experience.

We’ve gone through a huge range of topics – so to cement understanding, let’s look at a few quick case studies and examples, including the mighty Wikipedia, to see internal linking in action (both good and bad).

Case Studies & Examples

Looking at real-world examples can illustrate just how powerful (or damaging) internal linking can be. Here are a few:

How Wikipedia Dominates with Internal Links

We’ve referenced Wikipedia several times because it’s the poster child for internal linking done right. Wikipedia’s internal link strategy:

• Every article is densely linked to other relevant articles (often 50-100+ links per article). Key terms, historical dates, names, etc. all link to their pages.
  
  
• There are virtually no orphan pages on Wikipedia – every page is connected through some other page or category.
  
  
• Minimal external links: Wikipedia mainly uses external links only in references. The content itself overwhelmingly links inward, keeping users on Wikipedia and funneling link equity internally.
  
  
• The anchor texts are usually just the article titles or exact terms, which is perfectly natural in an encyclopedia context.
  
  

Results: When Google crawls Wikipedia, it finds a well-structured web of knowledge. If a Wikipedia page has any value, chances are many other pages link to it, reinforcing that it’s useful. 

Users benefit by easily jumping to related topics (hence spending long times on Wikipedia, going down the rabbit hole of links). These user engagement signals (low bounce, high dwell time) and the comprehensive coverage help Wikipedia rank extremely well for a myriad of queries.

Statistics: A general Wikipedia article can have 500-600 internal links (including the content and nav menus). This strong interlinking contributes to Wikipedia often taking the top 1-3 spots for informational queries. 

Google trusts it as an authority partly because its internal linking makes each page very context-rich and accessible. Wikipedia’s bounce rate is low; people often click multiple internal links, which likely helps its SEO indirectly through engagement.

Lesson for you: You obviously can’t (and shouldn’t) force 500 links into your content just to mimic Wikipedia. But the principle is to comprehensively link all related topics. If you have a niche site, aim to be the Wikipedia of your niche – every term or subtopic you mention, have you written a page on it? If yes, link it. If not, maybe that’s a content idea.

Also, Wikipedia shows the power of user-focused linking: they link because they assume the reader might want deeper info on that term. Adopt that mindset: “Will the reader want to learn more about this concept? If so, do we have a page for it?”

Finally, Wikipedia keeps content updated and prunes irrelevant links. If an entry is outdated, it’s flagged. Similarly, on your site, keep your linked-to content fresh, or eventually stop linking things that are obsolete.

Internal Linking Success from an eCommerce Site

Consider an eCommerce site with thousands of products. Often these sites struggle to get product pages ranking because they’re deep and have little content. Internal linking can help surface them and give context.

A case study: 

A retail ecommerce brand noticed their deep subcategory pages (3-4 clicks from home) had declining traffic. They decided to add more internal links from higher-level pages (like from level 1 categories directly to some level 3 pages). 

They effectively flattened the structure a bit for those products. The result was a 24% increase in organic traffic to those pages.

Another case: 

A large retailer merged two categories and changed anchor text in the nav accordingly, which temporarily hurt their rankings for a keyword. 

They then adjusted internal links (making sure “collectibles” was used in anchors site-wide again) and recovered the ranking quickly. This shows how even the wording of internal links in navigation can impact rankings for specific terms.

On the positive side, adding a “Related Products” carousel can cross-link products that share tags like “Customers also viewed X”. 

Amazon does this heavily (though Amazon is a beast of its own, their internal linking via recommendation sliders is part of why you spend hours on Amazon and see multiple products).

One more e-commerce tactic: 

linking product pages to informative content and vice versa. For example, a furniture store might have a blog “Living Room Design Tips” which links to featured products (internal links to product pages), and product pages might have a section “Read our guide on living room design” linking back to the blog. 

This kind of two-way linking helps products get context and blog readers see products.

Lesson: Don’t let product pages sit in isolation in their category only. Link them from content, from home if seasonal, and interlink products (like “Complete the look: matching sofa here”). And ensure category pages link to top products (e.g., “Featured” or via sorting by popularity).

Internal Linking Done Wrong: Thin Blog Networks

Let’s look at an example of internal linking gone awry. Some sites in the past built what you could call a “link wheel” of thin content. 

For instance, 10 very low-quality blog posts that all link to each other in a circle and all link to a money page. The idea was to create the illusion of a cluster of content supporting the money page. 

However, if that content is thin (say each post is 200 words of fluff with a link), Google’s algorithms (especially Panda for content quality) can demote the whole set. You end up with a network of low-value pages dragging each other down.

Another wrong practice: linking every occurrence of a keyword to the same page in an almost automated fashion. 

I saw a site where every time the word “car” appeared in text, they linked it to their “car insurance quotes” page, regardless of context (even like “This is a cartoon” – the “car” in cartoon got linked!). 

It looked spammy and likely did more harm than good by irritating readers and diluting anchor relevance.

Also, over-linking in navigation: one company stuffed dozens of links in the footer thinking it would help SEO (“cheap flights to X, Y, Z” dozens of cities). 

Google caught on and it didn’t help their rankings; it possibly hurt because it was seen as a link scheme (plus, the page-level quality was reduced by having that spammy block).

If a case study of failure: There were content farms that interlinked tons of pages about every keyword variant. 

Google’s Panda update specifically targeted sites with lots of thin interlinked pages. Those sites got hit hard despite heavy interlinking because the content wasn’t delivering value.

Lesson: Internal linking cannot compensate for poor content. All pages involved in the linking should have some unique value. Also, don’t think internal links can be used to “sculpt” or rank a page if the linking pages are nonsense. Google is smart at ignoring or discounting links from irrelevant pages.

In summary, internal linking is a powerful tool, but as with any tool, use it wisely: in service of the user and with quality content. Now, let’s wrap up everything we’ve learned and drive home why internal links are indeed more than just hyperlinks – they’re the lifeblood of your site’s SEO and user experience.

Internal Linking Checklist (Quick Wins)

Before we conclude, here’s a handy checklist of internal linking best practices and quick wins you can apply to your site. Think of this as a summary cheat-sheet:

Each new blog post links to 2–5 relevant older posts. – Whenever you publish new content, include internal links to a few existing articles that are relevant. This helps the new page not be orphaned and also breathes new life into the older content by directing readers to it.

Top important pages have >5 internal links pointing to them. – Do an audit of your key money pages or pillar content. Ensure they’re linked from multiple other pages (ideally from your homepage or main nav, and contextually from relevant pages). If any high-priority page has only 1-2 incoming links, plan to add more.

Use descriptive anchor text (and avoid anchor cannibalization). – Check that your internal link anchors are clear and varied. Avoid using the exact same generic phrase for multiple different pages. 

For example, don’t have two different product pages both being linked with “best smartphone” anchors – differentiate them (one “best Android phone”, one “best iPhone”, etc.). Also steer clear of overly spammy exact-match anchors; favor natural phrasing.

Keep link depth reasonable (3-click rule). – Navigate your site as if you’re a user (or use a crawler) to ensure you can reach most pages within about 3 clicks. If some sections are buried deeper, consider adding internal links (from top nav, site map, or in-content) to shorten the path.

Audit internal links regularly (e.g., monthly or quarterly). – Set a schedule to run through your site with a tool or manually:

• Fix broken links (404s).
  
  
• Update any redirected links to direct ones.
  
  
• Identify orphan pages and link them.
  
  
• Remove links to pages that no longer exist or that you’ve decided to noindex.
  Regular check-ups keep your link graph healthy. As Brian Dean suggests, doing an internal link audit a couple of times a year is a great habit.
  
  

Ensure UX and SEO alignment on link placement. – Place internal links where they make sense for users and in a way that benefits SEO. That means, for example, putting related article links in body text (users are more likely to click them, and Google gives them weight for context) rather than in some footer where they might be ignored. 

If your UX team is hesitant to add too many links because of clutter, work with them to find a balance (maybe a “related reading” box that looks nice, for instance). 

The goal is to integrate internal links such that they enhance the reading/browsing experience.

Leverage navigation and breadcrumbs. – Make sure your site has a clear navigation menu linking main pages, and breadcrumbs on multi-level pages. These not only help users but also create additional internal links for Google to understand structure.

Internal link to conversion pages where appropriate. – Check that your internal links strategy also supports your business goals. Each major blog post should have at least one internal link towards a signup page, product page, or contact page (if it fits naturally). 

Don’t miss opportunities to internally drive traffic to the pages that convert.

By following this checklist, you can quickly improve your site’s internal linking without boiling the ocean. 

Often just a day of internal link cleanup and addition can show positive results in SEO over the next few weeks (like better indexing or slight ranking boosts for the pages now getting links).

Finally, let’s gaze into the future a bit: where is internal linking headed in the coming years?

Future of Internal Linking

The core principles of internal linking will remain – helping navigation and distributing authority. But the landscape could evolve with new technologies and search behaviors. Here are a few thoughts on the future:

AI-Generated Internal Linking using NLP: As mentioned, tools are already using AI to suggest links. In the future, AI might handle even more of this automatically. 

Imagine a CMS that dynamically inserts internal links based on real-time analysis of content and user data. It could use natural language understanding to figure out, “This paragraph is about topic X, we have a great page on X, let’s link it here.” 

Google’s increasing emphasis on NLP (like BERT, MUM algorithms) means the more semantically connected your site, the better. AI might help maintain those connections at scale, especially on big sites. 

However, we’d need to watch that it doesn’t become spammy – guidelines and human oversight will still matter.

Personalized Internal Linking (User-specific): Websites may start tailoring internal link suggestions based on user profiles or behavior. 

For example, an educational site might reorder “recommended articles” based on what the system knows you’ve read before or what your interests are (much like how YouTube or Netflix recommends content). 

From an SEO perspective, this is tricky because Googlebot sees a generic version. But for users, it could drastically increase engagement by always showing enticing internal links. 

If user engagement becomes an even stronger signal for search (there are debates about that), then personalized links keeping users longer could indirectly boost SEO.

Integration with Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Web: Search engines are leaning into understanding real-world entities and how content pieces together (Google’s Knowledge Graph, etc.). 

Internal linking could play a role in building your site’s own mini knowledge graph. For instance, some sites use schema markup to explicitly say “Page A is about [Entity] which is related to [Entity] on Page B.” 

This is like taking internal linking to a structured data level. In the future, internal links might not just be raw hrefs, but carry more semantic information. 

Perhaps a “knowledge graph sitemap” could exist, or Google might reward sites that essentially build a Wikipedia-like structure around entities via internal linking and schema.

Voice and AI assistants changing navigation: If more searches are via voice or done by AI assistants (like Siri, Alexa, etc.), the concept of clicking internal links might shift. Assistants might instead guide users through a site (“Would you like to hear about X? Yes? 

Okay, moving to that section.”). Ensuring your site’s internal structure is clear helps these systems. Possibly in the future, an AI could traverse your site’s links to answer a user’s multi-part question. 

This means logical internal linking (like Q&A flows) could become important to feed AI direct answers (we see an early version with FAQ schema and Google’s featured snippets – internal links that jump to sections via anchor links might be used more if Google sends people to a specific part of your page).

Less Emphasis on Traditional Website Navigation: This is speculative, but with developments like Google’s continuous scrolling, passages ranking, etc., users might enter sites directly at deep points more often (they already do via search). So the site of the future might be more like a web of content and less like a hierarchical tree that users manually drill down. Internal links (perhaps combined with on-page tabs or interactive elements) would serve to guide users laterally to whatever they need next, rather than expecting them to go up and down a menu tree. In short, contextual linking might overtake structural navigation in importance.

• Automatic Broken Link Fixing: Future CMS might automatically detect broken internal links and suggest fixes (maybe even auto-fix by pointing to an archived version or closest match). This would use AI to reduce 404 issues.
  
  

Knowledge Panel integration: If your site becomes known for a topic, Google might show multiple internal links directly in SERPs (like sitelinks). 

Already we see some sites have rich snippets showing sub-links (e.g., a forum thread might show links to specific answers). Google might do that more with the help of clear internal linking and anchors on your pages.

In essence, the fundamentals likely stay: internal links will always be about connecting content. The future just holds smarter ways to do it (AI assistance), and new surfaces (personal assistants, etc.) where the concept of an internal link might be more conversational or data-driven.

One thing’s for sure: internal linking isn’t going away. If anything, as search and user behavior evolves, having a robust internal linking strategy will remain a cornerstone of good SEO and UX. So keep honing it!

Alright, we’re coming to the end. Let’s conclude and recap why internal links are so critical and some final advice to put all this into action.

Conclusion

We’ve traveled through the world of internal links from the basics to advanced tactics. By now, you should see why internal links are underrated but absolutely critical for both SEO and user experience.

To recap the key points:

• Internal links are more than just hyperlinks; they’re the navigational blood vessels of your website – they carry visitors and search engine crawlers to all parts of your site, ensuring every page gets the attention it deserves.
  
  
• They improve crawlability, allowing Google to find and index your content, and they distribute link equity so even pages without external backlinks can gain some authority by association.
  
  
• Good internal linking provides context and relevance – telling search engines how your pages relate and what topics you cover in depth.
  
  
• They also enhance user engagement by keeping readers on your site longer (reducing bounce rate, increasing dwell time), which indirectly signals to Google that your site is high quality.
  
  
• Internal links shape your site architecture, whether you use a flat, silo, or hub-and-spoke model. A smart structure helps both users and crawlers – think of it as designing a museum with a logical layout vs. a confusing labyrinth.
  
  
• We discussed many best practices: use clear anchor text, link relevant pages, give more links to important pages, keep pages within a few clicks, avoid spamming links, and use breadcrumbs/navigation effectively.
  
  
• Advanced strategies like content clusters, avoiding internal nofollow, using AI tools for linking, and dynamic recommendations can further sharpen your internal linking game.
  
  
• On the technical side, it’s vital that your links are actually crawlable (especially on JS-heavy sites), and that you fix broken links and avoid messy redirects to maintain a smooth crawl path.
  
  
• We saw real examples: Wikipedia dominating by linking everything relevant (and thus owning topical authority), and e-commerce sites boosting traffic by adding internal links to deep pages. Conversely, neglecting or misusing internal links can hurt (or at least, you miss opportunities).
  
  

Final advice: Think like both a search engine crawler and a human user when building internal links. Ask yourself:

• For the crawler: Can it easily find all my pages? Is my important content getting enough internal links to signal it’s important? Am I wasting crawl budget on trivial pages?
  
  
• For the human: If I were reading this page, what other information might I want next? Does this link provide value or distract? Am I frustrated by hitting dead ends or irrelevant links?
  
  

By satisfying both, you create a site that’s technically sound and genuinely useful. And that’s the recipe for long-term SEO success.

So, take a moment to audit your own site’s internal links using the checklist and tools we provided. Even small tweaks like adding a few strategic links or fixing a broken one can unlock hidden SEO power – often faster and easier than building new external backlinks.