Internal Linking: Principles and Common Mistakes

01What internal linking does for SEO

Google discovers new pages mostly by following links. If a page gets no link from anywhere on the site, it may be indexed late or treated as unimportant even when it is in the sitemap. Internal links do three jobs: they make discovery and crawling easier, they spread the authority of strong pages to others, and their anchor text describes what the target is about.

Visitors benefit in the same way. A link placed at the right moment carries a reader from a keyword-research article to a service page; without it they go back and start a new search. This article complements our complete technical SEO guide and focuses only on the link layer.

02Anchor text: what to write and what to avoid

A good anchor is short, descriptive and fits naturally into the sentence. If a reader only skims the links, they should be able to guess where each one leads.

A practical rule: use several different, natural phrasings per target. Link a speed page once with “reducing load time”, elsewhere with “page load speed optimisation” and elsewhere with “site speed”. The same exact anchor repeated across ten pages looks more like manipulation than guidance.

03Hub-and-cluster structure: pillar page and supporting articles

Instead of scattered links, group topics. A pillar page covers a broad subject at a high level and links to several deeper articles; each cluster article links back to the pillar and, where relevant, to its siblings.

In an SEO site, for example, the pillar could be our technical SEO guide and the cluster could hold articles on Core Web Vitals, sitemaps, structured data and speed. Topical strength gathers in one place and readers get a natural reading path.

Click depth

Keep important pages within three clicks of the home page. The deeper a page sits, the less often it is typically crawled. The main menu, footer and “related articles” blocks are the tools for reducing depth.

04Where to place links and how many

Links inside the main body usually say more about topical relevance than menu or footer links because they sit within a sentence. Put the link where the reader becomes curious about the concept, not in an unrelated list at the end.

• There is no magic number; the test is whether each link helps the reader. A 1,500-word article with five to ten internal links usually feels natural.
• One link to a given target in the body is enough; repeating it every paragraph only adds noise.
• After publishing a new article, go back to older related ones and link to it; most people forget this step.

05Auditing your links in practice

To check a single page quickly you can list the internal links in the main content, with their anchors, from the browser console:

// Run in the browser console on any page
const here = location.hostname;
const rows = [...document.querySelectorAll("main a[href]")]
  .filter(a => new URL(a.href, location.href).hostname === here)
  .map(a => ({ anchor: a.textContent.trim(), href: a.getAttribute("href") }));
console.table(rows);

For the whole site use a crawler such as Screaming Frog or the Search Console links report and ask three questions: which pages have no inbound links, which links hit a 404 or a redirect, and which important page has the fewest links. Status-code details are in the Google Search documentation.

06Common mistakes

• Orphan pages: an article that exists only in the sitemap. Fix: at least two links from related pages.
• Same anchor for different targets: two pages sharing an anchor confuses Google about the intended target and feeds keyword cannibalisation.
• JavaScript “links” without an a tag: an onclick on a div is not a real link and crawlers will not follow it. Always use <a href>.
• Redirect chains: update links to the final URL rather than an old one that redirects.
• Link-stuffed footers: a hundred cities or services add no value and hurt the user experience.

07Pre-publish checklist

1. At least three descriptive internal links to related articles or pages are in place.
2. At least two older pages link to this new article.
3. No link is worded “here” or “click”.
4. Every link returns 200 and does not redirect.
5. To help conversions, one soft link to the SEO service or another relevant page sits in a natural spot.