Internal linking: a practical guide

Why links between your pages matter

Internal links are the links from one page of your site to another: the menu, the footer, the “related products” block and, most usefully, the links inside your text. They do three jobs at once.

• They help pages get found. Google discovers most pages by following links. A page nothing links to may never be found, or found late, even if it is in your sitemap.
• They explain what a page is about. The words of a link, called anchor text, tell Google and readers what to expect on the other side.
• They show what matters. Pages that many of your other pages link to look more important than pages buried at the end of a long chain.

Unlike links from other websites, internal links are fully in your hands. That makes them one of the simplest improvements you can make, and one of the easiest to neglect as a site grows.

How Google reads a link

Google follows links written as ordinary HTML: an <a> element with an href address. Links that only work through a script, such as a button that changes the page when clicked but has no address, may not be followed. If your menu or product filters are built that way, check them with the URL Inspection tool in Search Console, which shows the page as Google sees it.

<a href="https://www.example.com/roses/climbing">climbing roses for shady walls</a>

Don’t add nofollow to links between your own pages. It asks Google not to follow the link, which is rarely what you want for your own site. To keep a page out of Google, use a noindex tag on the page itself, as our robots.txt and sitemap guide explains.

Check your links, step by step

1. Crawl your site. Use a crawler from your home page, as in the full audit. Export every page with its status code, the number of internal links pointing to it, and its depth (clicks from the home page).
2. Find orphan pages. Compare the crawl with your sitemap. Pages in the sitemap that the crawl never reached have no links pointing to them. Decide for each: link to it from a related page, or retire it.
3. Find pages buried deep. Sort by depth. Seoga’s scan flags pages more than three clicks from the home page; that is a useful rule of thumb, not a Google limit. Important pages should be closer.
4. Fix broken and redirected links. List links that lead to a 404 or through a 301. Change each to point straight at the right, final address.
5. Look at your most important pages. How many internal links point to them, and from where? A key service page with two links pointing to it deserves more.

Write links people understand

Good anchor text says where the link goes, in a few natural words. It helps readers decide whether to click, and helps Google understand the page it points to.

Vary the words naturally. Linking to the same page with exactly the same phrase from fifty places looks mechanical. Write the link the way you would mention the page in a sentence.

Build a structure, not a tangle

The most useful internal links follow the shape of your subjects. For each main topic, have one strong overview page that links to the detailed pages, and have each detailed page link back to the overview and across to its closest neighbours. Our guide to topic clusters shows how to plan this.

• Menus carry your main sections. Keep them short; a menu with a hundred links says nothing about which ones matter.
• Breadcrumbs (Home › Roses › Climbing roses) show where a page sits, and give every page a link back up.
• Links in your text carry the most meaning. When you mention a subject you have a page about, link to it.
• Related blocks under articles or products help visitors go on, if they show truly related pages.

How many links is right?

There is no magic number. Google’s advice is to keep the number of links on a page reasonable, and to link where it helps the reader. A long guide may link to a dozen related pages; a short product page may link to five. What matters more is that each link is there for a reason. If you would not expect a reader to click it, it probably adds little.

Watch for the opposite problem too. Footers and sidebars that repeat the same hundred links on every page add noise and push the useful links in your text into the crowd. Keep site-wide blocks for what visitors truly need everywhere: the main sections, contact, and policies.

Shops, filters and page numbers

Online shops have extra link traps. Filters for colour, size and price can create thousands of addresses showing nearly the same products. Sorting options can double them again. Make sure the category pages themselves are linked from the menu or the home page, that each product is linked from at least one category, and that the numbered pages of a long category (page 2, page 3) use ordinary links, so Google can reach products further down. Filter combinations nobody searches for don’t need to be found at all.

A simple routine

• Every month: fix new broken links and links through redirects.
• Every time you publish: link the new page from two or three related pages.
• Every few months: look again for orphan pages and for important pages buried deep.