Internal Linking
Last updated September 2026
Internal linking is the practice of linking from one page on a site to another page on the same domain. It helps search engines discover and crawl content, distributes ranking authority across a site, and signals which pages the site considers most important.
Every link on a site pointing to another page on that same site is an internal link. Individually small, collectively they form the structure a search engine uses to understand how a site is organized, which pages are most central to that structure, and how much relative weight to assign each one.
01
What internal links actually do
Internal links serve three functions at once, as Google's SEO Starter Guide describes. They give crawlers a path to discover new or deep pages that might otherwise sit unlinked and unindexed. They pass a portion of a page's accumulated authority to the pages it links to, similar in principle to how a backlink passes authority from an outside domain, which is why a heavily-linked-to page tends to carry more ranking weight than an orphaned one. And they tell both users and search engines which pages the site treats as most important, based on how often and how prominently they are linked.
02
Building a deliberate internal linking structure
- 01
Link from high-authority pages, like the homepage and top category pages, down to the pages that most need the support
- 02
Use descriptive anchor text that reflects the destination page's topic rather than generic phrases like "click here"
- 03
Keep important pages within a few clicks of the homepage; pages buried deep in a site structure are harder to discover and rank
- 04
Avoid orphan pages, ones with no internal links pointing to them at all, since they are far less likely to be crawled or ranked
- 05
Update older content with links to newer, related pages as a site's content library grows
03
Why this matters more on larger sites
On a small site, internal linking issues rarely cause serious harm because there are few pages competing for crawl budget. On a large site, hundreds or thousands of pages deep, weak internal linking is one of the most common reasons that strong content underperforms: the pages exist, but the site's own structure never signals that they matter, so they never accumulate enough domain authority to rank. Auditing internal link structure is a standard part of any technical SEO review for a site of meaningful size.
