Internal links
What are internal links?
Internal links are hyperlinks that point from one page to another page on the same website, such as navigation menus, breadcrumbs, related posts and links within the body text. They help visitors move around the site, help search engines discover and understand pages, and pass ranking signals from stronger pages to weaker ones.
Search engines find most pages by following links, so a page with no internal links pointing to it, an orphan page, may never be crawled. The anchor text of internal links tells Google what the target page is about. Pages linked from many important pages, like the homepage, tend to be treated as more important, because link equity flows through internal links as well as external ones.
Contextual links, placed in the body text where they are relevant, are especially useful because they connect related topics. That is the idea behind topic clusters: a pillar page links to detailed subtopic pages and they link back.
Why internal links matter for SEO
Internal linking is one of the few ranking levers fully under your control. Linking a new page from a strong, relevant page can help it get crawled and ranked faster.
It also shapes how visitors move through the site towards conversions, and keeps important pages within a few clicks of the homepage.
How to build internal links
- Link to every important page from at least one relevant page, using normal <a href> links.
- Use descriptive anchor text that says what the target page is about; avoid “click here”.
- Link from your strongest pages, such as those with the most backlinks, to pages you want to boost.
- Add links in the body where they genuinely help the reader, not only in footers and sidebars.
- Link related pages to each other in clusters.
- Fix broken internal links and update links that point to redirected URLs.
- Check crawl depth: keep key pages within about three clicks of the homepage.
Internal links example
<p>Before you feed it, check that your <a href="/guides/sourdough-starter">sourdough starter</a> has doubled in size.</p>Internal links FAQ
How many internal links should a page have?
There is no fixed number. Add links where they help the reader; a page with hundreds of links dilutes each one and is hard to use.
Should internal links be nofollow?
Generally no. Nofollow on internal links stops signals flowing to your own pages. Use noindex or robots.txt, not nofollow, to manage pages you don’t want in search.
Do internal links help rankings?
Yes. They help Google discover pages, understand their topic through anchor text and judge their importance within the site.
Related SEO terms
Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link. Search engines read it as a clue to what the linked page is about.
An orphan page is a page with no internal links pointing to it, so visitors and crawlers cannot reach it by browsing the site.
Link equity, or link juice, is the ranking value a link passes from one page to another, based on the linking page’s authority and relevance.
Site architecture is how a website’s pages are organised and linked together, which shapes how people and search engines find and value them.
Crawl depth is how many clicks a page is from the homepage. Deep pages are found and crawled less often than shallow ones.
A topic cluster is a group of pages about one subject: a pillar page covering it broadly, linked to cluster pages that cover subtopics in depth.
Breadcrumbs are a row of links showing where a page sits in a site’s hierarchy, such as Home > Shoes > Running. They help users and search engines.