Internal Linking: The Complete Guide for SEO

Internal linking has always been a cornerstone of SEO. It's what connects your pages together and helps search engines make sense of your site. For new websites fresh out of the box, it's a job that doesn't take too much time and effort; you might only have two or three articles to link together. Everything is neat and tidy.

But what happens as your business and website grows? What can you do when you're five years into your project and you have hundreds of articles, product pages, and pillar posts to link together?

The good thing is that you generally don't need a sophisticated strategy. The core processes and thinking behind internal linking have remained the same, in spite of the evolution of AI technologies and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO). You just need to make sure you remain diligent with it, despite everything else you need to do.

In this comprehensive guide for website internal linking in 2026, we'll be reaffirming what internal linking is and why it is important. We'll cover the challenges that businesses often face when trying to implement internal linking, as well as exploring what good linking practices look like.

What is Internal Linking?

An internal link is a hyperlink that points from one page of your website to another. Unlike external linking (which takes a user from a place on your website to an outside source via hyperlink) or backlinking (where an external site points back to your own), everything related to internal linking takes place within a business's own domain.

There are several different types of internal links that a business can utilize, such as:

Navigational links: These are the broad headings that you'll find at the top of most business websites. Common examples of these include 'Home', 'About', and 'Contact' page links.

Breadcrumb links: These are the sub-category links that often appear if you hover over the navigational links. They essentially break down the core headings into more nuanced sub-section navigation.

Contextual links: These are hyperlinks that appear within the body text of articles (in the form of anchor text) and product pages. These links will naturally become the bulk of your internal linking strategy and they are by far the most important as they definitively tell search engines what the destination page is about and how it corresponds to the current topic.

Why Internal Linking Matters

When speaking of utilising internal linking as a website engagement strategy, John Mueller, a Search Advocate from Google, stated that internal linking is 'one of the biggest things that you can do on a website' and that it is 'super critical for SEO.'

And yet, despite its importance, internal linking remains one of the most neglected areas of SEO. Research by Semrush found that 25% of web pages have zero incoming internal links, while a study of over 5,000 websites by InLinks revealed that 82% of internal linking opportunities were being missed entirely. While it has traditionally been considered a time-consuming job, getting it right is essential for the overall effectiveness of your website.

Here are the key reasons why effective internal linking matters:

Discoverability & Crawlability

Google discovers new pages by sending crawlers across the web. These crawlers find and follow links to discover new pages to add to indexes. Once discovered and catalogued, the web page can climb rankings through other SEO strategies and additional linking processes.

If you don't have a robust set of internal links across each area of your website, then Google cannot discover them, and therefore cannot rank them. This makes driving organic traffic to your website via search queries almost impossible. Google's own documentation on how links are crawled reinforces this: if a link isn't crawlable, the page behind it may as well not exist.

Signaling Hierarchy and Importance

Internal links also provide a way for Google to know which pages are deemed as a higher priority than others. If a website has five-hundred internal links that guide a user to a core services area, as opposed to a blog post which may only have a handful of links from other pages, then Google will come to understand that the core services page is the most important, and therefore will be given higher priority when ranking.

Establishing Context and Topical Authority

Whenever you place a hyperlink into the body of an article, you're doing so using what's known as anchor text. These are the literal words that are attached to the link and are what will take the user from the current page to a new one. These contextual links help Google to understand the relationship between pages and establish topical authority.

The User Experience

A final reason why internal linking matters is that, when set up effectively, it can turn a user's casual visit via a search engine query into an extended exploration of what you have to offer. This behaviour, affectionately known as the 'Wikipedia blackhole,' is where users continue to click on contextual hyperlinks that pique their interest. And before long, they've cycled through half a dozen of your articles or product pages!

This has several benefits. It helps reduce bounce rate (the percentage of users who leave after engaging with a single page). It extends the time spent on your website (often a good indication of site authority). And it helps build trust with the user, making it more likely that they'll come back again.

The Real Problem With Internal Linking

If internal linking is seen as this vitally important mechanism that helps contribute to exceptional SEO performance, why does it get overlooked and neglected so often?

There are a number of reasons why this might be the case:

The 'finished' fallacy: Internal linking is often something that is done after a piece is written rather than as the writer goes along. By the time they've written an entire article, they are often mentally exhausted and deem it to be finished. Adding the links often feels like an extra assignment rather than an important SEO step.

A lack of wider site knowledge: Many companies turn to copywriters or freelancers to write their articles, who don't have the time to scour through an entire website of content to learn what can be linked to. You can't link to a resource you don't know is there (it's why a search bar on your blog page is often a gold mine).

The 'Bystander Effect': Internal linking is one of those nebulous areas that often doesn't have someone directly responsible for it. Is it the writer's job, or is it something the marketing team should do? Or the editor? This lack of clear accountability can result in it not being touched at all.

A lack of visibility: Internal links can become broken without anyone realising it. And no one receives alerts when this happens, so the link can remain invisible forever.

What Good Internal Linking Looks Like

Fortunately, effective internal linking is something that all businesses can achieve. Aside from the key mantra that consistency is king, there are a number of technical steps you can apply to your articles and website as a whole to help build good internal linking habits, leading to increased traffic and revenue:

A Clear Site Hierarchy

We've stressed that contextual linking in the form of anchor texts is perhaps the most influential form of internal linking. However, you shouldn't overlook the overall structure of your website, particularly on the home page.

Your internal links should reflect a clear, logical structure. Your homepage should offer broad category pages, broken down into subcategory pages, before splitting into individual articles and product pages.

Use Descriptive, Targeted Anchor Text

Anchor text is the means to allow your contextual links to do their work, so it has to be effective. Many writers and SEO teams fall into the trap of anchoring text to direct instructions or literal Call to Actions (CTA) with 'click here' often being the most obvious example.

Instead, you should be looking to anchor your contextual links to text that informs Google (and the reader) exactly what they'll find when they click through. Some typical examples might include things like:

Read our complete guide to content clusters to see how we organise topics.
Explore our top 10 workflow automation software tools of 2026.
A common query that often comes up is how to create a hyperlink within your spreadsheet or body of work.

In these examples, the contextual link is contained within anchor text that feels natural, but is still descriptive. Additionally, they could easily be direct search query phrases that a user will enter into Google, which really primes your page for a high ranking.

Consistent Maintenance

As your website continues to grow and evolve, and you create and build more and more pages into your ecosystem, your internal links may start to feel a little outdated and inadequate. It might not be the most stimulating task, but updating old posts to link to new content, double checking and fixing broken links, and redirecting removed URLs properly are all important steps to keeping your website authoritative and trustworthy.

That said, getting into the spiral of achieving the perfect ratios, volumes, and placements of your internal links is often counterproductive. The next section breaks down exactly what you can stop worrying about.

What Not to Worry About

There is no shortage of internal linking advice online, and a lot of it sounds authoritative enough to make you second-guess everything you're doing. The problem is that much of it focuses on micro-optimisations that are unlikely to make a meaningful difference to your rankings. Here's what you can safely stop worrying about.

Anchor Text Ratios

You'll see recommendations about maintaining specific percentages of branded, exact-match, and partial-match anchor text across your internal links. This kind of ratio management makes some sense for backlink profiles, where unnatural patterns can trigger penalties. But for internal links, it's overthinking it. You control your own site. Vary your anchor text naturally, make it descriptive, and move on.

Link Density Per 100 Words

There is no optimal formula here. A 2,000-word article might have three internal links or eight, depending entirely on how many relevant pages exist on your site and how many natural opportunities arise within the content. As a practical benchmark, somewhere around 3 to 5 links per 1,000 words is reasonable, but it's a guideline rather than a rule. Wikipedia links practically every other sentence and it does just fine, because every one of those links points to something genuinely relevant. The test is whether each link serves the reader, not whether you've hit a particular density threshold. As we've written before, SEO is simpler than most people make it, and this is one of those areas where that's especially true.

First Link Priority

The theory here is that Google only counts the anchor text of the first link pointing to a given page within an article. Even if this is true (and it's debated), it's a micro-optimisation that won't move the needle. If you naturally mention a topic early in your article and link to it, great. But don't restructure your writing to force a particular link into the first paragraph.

The Three-Click Rule

This is the idea that every important page should be reachable within three clicks of your homepage. It's a reasonable principle for smaller sites, but it quickly becomes impractical as your site grows. A site with five hundred pages simply cannot keep everything within three clicks without creating unwieldy navigation. Focus on making important pages easy to find rather than counting clicks.

Link Equity Calculations

Don't try to engineer exactly how "link juice" flows through your site. John Mueller himself has said to "forget everything you read about link juice", calling it "very likely all obsolete, wrong, and/or misleading." He later doubled down in 2022, saying anything that talks about link juice should simply be ignored, and that the focus should be on making websites with content that's useful to real people (Search Engine Roundtable, July 2020; October 2022). Build a linking structure that works for your users and Google will figure out the rest.

The pattern across all of these is the same: if you're spending more time thinking about linking than actually linking, you're optimising the wrong thing.

Dealing With Your Orphan Pages

Orphan pages are those pages within your website that have no internal links pointing to them. They exist within your site's files and appear on your sitemap, but there is no path linking to them from any other page on your domain.

Orphan pages are often considered to be a silent problem that affects SEO and page performance. They are referred to in this manner because, unlike something like a 404 error that breaks your site, orphan pages don't trigger any form of alarm or alert. Instead, they just sit there, invisible to users and largely ignored by search engines.

How Do Orphan Pages Appear?

Orphan pages usually appear in one of four ways:

Publish and forget: You diligently add internal links pointing from the new article to high-performing ones, but you forget to do the process in reverse.

Site migrations: During a redesign or a move to a new CMS, old URL structures often get left behind. If the navigation doesn't account for them, they become orphaned.

Content deletions: Pages may reside within a category that then gets deleted during a restructure. There is now no access to these pages.

Legacy content: Old landing pages for expired promotions or seasonal events are often forgotten and left abandoned.

Why Orphan Pages Kill Performance

Orphan pages are up against it when it comes to SEO performance. As mentioned previously, Google predominantly finds content by following a link chain. But if there are no links that lead to a new post or page, or one that's been cut adrift, then the only way Google can locate them is through your XML sitemap, which is a much slower method.

There is also the issue with site authority passing from high-performing pages to newer ones. Without internal links from authoritative pages feeding into it, new pages cannot benefit from this latent authority, making it much harder to rank for things such as competitive keywords.

This all combines to create the impression that the page is of low-importance and that you don't care much for it, often providing the final nail in the coffin for its overall performance.

How to Find and Fix Your Orphan Pages

In order to find your orphan pages, you need a tool that can compare your sitemap (what you say is on your site) against your crawl (what is actually discoverable via links). Screaming Frog is the go-to tool for this, and we cover it in more detail in the auditing section below.

Once you've identified the pages in question, you have three clear options:

Build links for them: This is the most optimal strategy - you find ways of incorporating the page into your wider web network. This will involve checking sibling pages to see if there are any obvious crossovers in terms of anchor text and contextual links.

Redirect them: If the page is old but still has some historical value, redirect to newer, more relevant pages.

Delete them: Alternatively, if you've written completely updated versions of the page, or if the page has too much outdated information, you may as well remove it from your sitemap entirely.

Ultimately, you'll want to try and prevent orphan pages from appearing in the first place. You can do this by immediately adding a couple of links from existing pages to your new one. You'll likely need a firm grasp of your content to achieve this.

Internal Linking for Different Sites and Scenarios

Depending on where you're at in your business journey, and depending on what type of business you are operating, your internal linking strategy and process will likely look very different.

With that in mind, let's take a look at some of the key distinctions between various businesses and what they should look to do.

New Sites (Under 50 Pages)

For new sites just starting out, your focus should be on:

Planning the pillars: We've established that pillar and cluster posts is a very good strategy associated with internal linking, so why not make it a priority from the start? Devise a plan deciding what your main pillar posts should be, the associated cluster posts, and where there are links that can be applied.

A 3-2-1 approach: As a good starting point, for each new written piece include three links to existing articles, find two links from existing articles pointing to the new one, and one link to send readers back to the pillar post itself.

Finalize navigational and breadcrumb links: While anchored, contextual links are important, make sure that your other forms of internal linking are fully in place from the off as well.

Established Sites (Hundreds of Pages)

For more established websites, your key tasks will include:

Auditing: It may end up being a bit of a trial, but it's very important to get things back under control with a thorough auditing of your existing content and links. You can use crawlers to help establish the current state of your link trails.

Prioritization: Don't try to fix everything at once. Start with your orphan pages (highest risk), move to high-value and money pages (highest reward), and then target your broken links.

Process updates: Once you've got a handle on everything again, you should take steps to avoid the build-up from repeating itself by building these linking tasks into your overall workflow.

Blog-Heavy Sites

If you know your website is going to prioritize articles, or if that's what your site has turned into, your best friend will be the topic cluster model. This keeps your site organized by subject matter rather than just a chronological list of posts.

You should also try to avoid relying on 'related post' widgets and boxes that are often found at the bottom of a page. A link placed mid-sentence when the reader is actively engaged with and thinking about the topic is infinitely more valuable for SEO and engagement.

Product/Service Sites

If your site primarily sells services rather than physical products, the internal linking principles remain the same, but the balance between informational and commercial content becomes more important.

Linking from blog content to your service pages is natural and effective, as long as it's done in context. If you've written a genuine article about tips for washing windows, for example, and you mention that professional services can handle certain situations that are difficult to do yourself, linking to your window washing service page makes complete sense. The reader was already thinking about the topic and the link gives them an obvious next step.

What you want to avoid is the spammy version of this. If your article mentions "window washing in Dallas" fifty times and every instance links to the same service page, that's not helpful to anyone and Google can see through it. The difference is intent: are you linking because the reader would genuinely benefit from seeing that page at this point, or are you linking because you want to force authority towards a commercial page? If it's the latter, pull back.

Treat your service pages like any other page on your site when it comes to internal links. They should earn links through relevance, not volume. If your blog content is genuinely related to the service you offer (and it should be, if your content strategy is working), the links will happen naturally without needing to force them.

Ecommerce Sites

For sites that are heavily involved in ecommerce and product listings, clear hierarchies and pathways become much more important. Without effective internal linking, your products will get buried under layers of categories.

So keep things clean, and follow the funnel of category, subcategory, and product for all of your listings. Each product you sell should have a clear, easy-to-access home for potential customers. Cross-link products by setting up additional 'frequently bought together' avenues to help increase revenue potential.

Internal Linking and Content Clusters

Content clusters have become one of the most effective ways to build topical authority, but the concept only works if the internal linking is in place to support it. Without the links, you just have a collection of loosely related articles sitting next to each other.

The structure is straightforward. A pillar page covers a broad topic comprehensively, giving readers an overview of the subject and touching on each of its key subtopics. Cluster pages then take each of those subtopics and explore them in much greater depth. For example, a pillar post on SEO fundamentals might cover on-page SEO, technical SEO, link building, and content strategy at a high level. Each of those areas then gets its own dedicated cluster page that goes far deeper than the pillar ever could.

The internal links are what bind this structure together. Every cluster page should link back to the pillar, and the pillar should link out to each of its cluster pages. Cluster pages should also link to each other where there's a natural connection between their topics. This creates a web of interlinked content that signals to Google that your site has genuine depth on the subject, rather than just a single article that happens to mention it.

The benefit goes beyond SEO signals. When a reader lands on one of your cluster pages through a search query, the links to related content keep them exploring. They can go deeper on a subtopic, return to the pillar for broader context, or jump to a related cluster page that caught their eye. This is the "Wikipedia blackhole" in action, built deliberately into your site's architecture.

The most common mistake with content clusters is treating the linking as an afterthought. Teams will plan the pillar, write the cluster pages, and then forget to actually connect them. At that point, you've done the hard work of creating the content but missed the step that makes it function as a cluster in the first place. This is one of the reasons why tools like Machined build automated internal linking into the content creation process itself. Links are placed with natural anchor text as part of the writing, rather than bolted on afterwards, so no page within a cluster is born disconnected.

The Case for Automation

In an ideal world, your team would remember every piece of content on the site and know exactly where to place links as they write. In practice, that stops being realistic once you have more than a few dozen pages.

This is where automation earns its place. There's a lingering sense in some SEO circles that automating internal links is cutting corners, but that misses the point. Google's algorithm doesn't care whether a human hand highlighted a string of text or whether software did it. What matters is that the links exist and they offer relevance and value.

If a machine can find a connection that a weary human editor missed, the machine has provided more value to the reader. Thoughtful, rule-based automation will always beat inconsistent manual work.

By offloading the discovery slog to an automation tool, you make sure that no page is born an orphan and that topical authority is built into the site's foundation from day one.

Common Internal Linking Mistakes

Most internal linking mistakes aren't dramatic. They don't break your site or trigger penalties overnight. They're the quiet, cumulative kind that slowly erode your site's ability to perform well in search. Here are the ones worth paying attention to.

Navigational links (your header, footer, and sidebar) are important for site structure, but they carry less SEO weight than contextual links placed within your content. If your pages are only linked to from navigation menus and never from within the body of other articles, they're missing out on the strongest type of internal link signal. Boilerplate links that appear on every page are treated differently by search engines from editorial links that appear because a writer intentionally connected two pieces of content.

Using the Same Anchor Text Repeatedly

If every link to your "content clusters" page uses the exact phrase "content clusters" as the anchor text, you're missing an opportunity to give Google a richer understanding of what that page covers. Vary it naturally. One link might say "how content clusters work," another might say "organising your site by topic." This variation isn't just better for SEO; it reads more naturally to the humans clicking on it too.

Creating Link Islands

A link island is a group of pages that link to each other but have few or no connections to the rest of your site. This often happens when a team creates a content cluster and forgets to connect it back to the wider site structure. Each cluster should have links going outward to other relevant sections of your site, not just circulating internally within the cluster itself.

Ignoring Older Content

When you publish a new article, you probably add a few links from it to existing content. But how often do you go back to older articles and add links to your newer pages? This is one of the most commonly missed opportunities. Your older, more established pages often carry more authority, and a link from them to a newer page can help that page gain traction much faster.

Burying Important Links at the Bottom of the Page

User engagement drops off sharply the further down the page you go, with most readers spending less than a minute on any given article. If your most important internal links are tucked away in a "related posts" widget at the bottom, most readers will never see them. Place your key links within the body of the content, ideally in the first half of the article, where readers are most actively engaged with the topic. From a crawler's perspective, links higher on the page are also discovered and followed more readily.

Misusing Redirects

When internal links point to URLs that redirect rather than the final destination, you're adding unnecessary steps for both users and crawlers. This is especially common after site migrations or URL restructures where old links haven't been updated.

A quick primer on the redirect types that matter. A 301 is a permanent redirect: it tells search engines that the original URL has moved permanently and that they should pass authority to the new URL. A 302 is a temporary redirect, meaning the original URL is expected to come back. A 307 is essentially the modern HTTP version of a 302. For the vast majority of SEO situations, a 301 is the only redirect you need. If a page has permanently moved, use a 301. If you find 302s or 307s in your internal link chain, it's worth checking whether they should actually be 301s instead.

Beyond choosing the right redirect type, the best practice is to update your internal links to point directly to the final URL rather than relying on redirects at all. Every redirect adds a small amount of latency and, in chains of multiple redirects, can dilute link equity.

Never Auditing

Internal linking problems accumulate silently. Broken links don't send you alerts. Orphan pages don't flag themselves. Redirect chains grow quietly in the background. Without periodic audits, these issues compound over time until you're left wondering why pages that should be performing well are struggling to rank.

Auditing Your Internal Links

If you've built internal linking into your publishing workflow from the start, you won't need to audit frequently. But even well-maintained sites benefit from a periodic check to catch the issues that inevitably slip through.

What to Look For

A good internal link audit should cover orphan pages (pages with no internal links pointing to them), pages with very few internal links relative to their importance, broken links returning 404 errors, redirect chains where one redirect leads to another, and your most-linked pages. That last one is worth checking because the answer is often surprising: your most internally linked pages may turn out to be your privacy policy or contact page (because they're in the footer on every page), rather than the pages you actually want to rank.

The Tool You Need

For most sites, Screaming Frog is the only tool you need. The free version lets you crawl up to 500 URLs, which is more than enough for smaller sites. If you need to go beyond that, the paid licence is £199 per year ($279) for unlimited crawls, which is remarkably reasonable compared to what most SEO tools charge.

Run a crawl of your site and you'll get a clear picture of which pages are being linked to, which ones aren't, where your broken links are, and how deep into your site structure each page sits. You can compare what's discoverable via links against your sitemap to quickly identify orphan pages. For the majority of businesses, this gives you everything you need to act on.

Google Search Console is also worth checking alongside your crawl. The "Links" section shows you your top internally linked pages and can highlight distribution issues you might not spot from a crawl alone. It's free and you should already have it set up.

How Often to Audit

If internal linking is built into your process and you're connecting new content as you publish it, a quarterly audit is sufficient for most sites. If you publish heavily (multiple pieces per week) or have recently gone through a site migration, you may want to audit monthly until things stabilise. The key point is that auditing shouldn't be a substitute for good habits. It's a safety net, not the strategy itself.

Conclusion

It's tempting to dismiss internal linking as just another arbitrary task to be completed if there's time available, but as you can hopefully now see, it's one of the most powerful levers you have to improve your site's performance. Data consistently shows that sites with a healthy, well-connected internal structure rank faster and stay relevant for longer.

The main reason websites fade away isn't because the concepts are too difficult to grasp. It's because the execution is often found wanting.

By following the core concepts and principles of internal linking such as prioritizing context within descriptive anchor text, auditing and amending your orphan pages, and scaling smartly with automation, you'll often reap the rewards before long.

You probably don't need a better internal linking strategy. You need to make sure the basics actually happen.