Search and SEO
What is Internal linking?
Internal linking is how pages on your own site link to each other. It determines what a crawler can reach, how authority flows between pages, and what a page is understood to be about — anchor text on internal links is one of the strongest on-site relevance signals available.
Also called: internal links · site architecture links
What good internal linking does
- Makes every page reachable within a few clicks of the home page
- Passes authority from pages that have links to pages that need them
- Describes the destination through anchor text, which the engine reads as a relevance signal
- Creates the topical structure that makes a cluster legible
Orphan pages
A page nothing links to is effectively invisible: it may be in the sitemap, it may even be indexed, but it receives no authority and reads as unimportant. Checking for orphans is one of the fastest audits there is, and most sites have some.
Anchor text in practice
- Describe the destination — "technical SEO guide" rather than "click here"
- Vary the wording naturally; identical anchors sitewide look engineered
- Link from within body content, which carries more weight than a navigation link
- Do not link every mention of a term. Three good links beat thirty
Where this is covered in depth
A definition can only go so far. Technical SEO, in the order the problems actually block you covers this properly — 4 minutes, free, no email required.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.