Internal linking for SEO: a practical guide

What are internal links?

Internal links are links from one page on your website to another page on the same website. Your menu, footer, breadcrumbs, category lists and the links inside your text are all internal links. Links from your site to other websites are outbound links, and links from other sites to yours are backlinks.

The links inside your body text, called contextual links, do the most work. They sit next to related words, so they tell both readers and search engines why the linked page is worth a look.

Why internal links matter for SEO

Search engines use internal links to find your pages and to understand what each page is about and how it fits into your site.

• Discovery and crawling. Google's link best practices say Google uses links to find new pages, and that every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site. The Bing Webmaster Guidelines list crawlable internal links as one of the ways Bing discovers URLs, alongside IndexNow, XML sitemaps and links from other sites.
• Context. The same Google guide says links are a signal for relevance, and that the anchor text (the clickable words) helps people and Google understand the page you link to.
• Importance. Pages your site links to often, from your home page, menus and hubs, are the ones you are clearly saying matter. A page buried behind many clicks, or linked only once, sends the opposite message.
• Visitors. Good internal links help people find the next useful page, which keeps them on your site instead of going back to the search results.

Search engines can only follow links they can read. Google's guide says it can reliably crawl a link only when it is an <a> element with an href attribute. Links that only work through a JavaScript click handler, with no real URL, may never be followed.

Anchor text: good and bad examples

Good anchor text is short, descriptive and tells the reader what they will get on the target page. Google's anchor text guidance asks for text that is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to the page it links to, and warns against generic text and stuffing keywords into links.

For image links, the image's alt text acts as the anchor text, so describe the target there too.

Click depth: keep key pages close to the home page

Click depth is how many clicks it takes to reach a page from your home page. Keep the pages that matter most within a few clicks.

Your home page usually has the most links pointing to it, from other sites and from your own pages. Pages linked from it, or from menus and hubs one step down, are found sooner by crawlers and get a clear signal that they matter. A page that can only be reached through a long chain of pagination or archive pages is easy to miss. Google does not publish a fixed limit, so treat "a few clicks" as a practical goal, not a rule. MrKeyword's Site Audit flags pages more than 3 clicks from the start page.

To make deep pages shallower, link them from a hub or category page, add them to the menu if they are important, and link to them from related posts.

Hub pages and topic clusters

A hub page (also called a pillar or topic page) covers a broad topic and links to every detailed page on it, and each detailed page links back to the hub.

For example, a "Technical SEO" hub might link to guides on XML sitemaps, canonical tags and broken links. Each of those guides links back to the hub and to its closest siblings. This keeps every page in the group a short click from the others, shows search engines how the pages relate, and gives readers an easy way to go deeper. Category pages in a shop do the same job for products.

Orphan pages

An orphan page is a page no other page on your site links to. Visitors cannot click their way to it, and search engines can only find it through a sitemap or a link from another site. Orphans often come from redesigns, old campaign landing pages and posts pushed off the end of a blog archive. Our guide on how to find and fix orphan pages shows how to compare your sitemap and Search Console with a crawl to find them.

A sitemap helps a search engine learn a URL exists, but it does not replace links. Read what an XML sitemap does for the difference.

Should you nofollow internal links?

No. Leave links to your own pages as normal links. Google's guide to qualifying outbound links describes rel="nofollow" as a way to mark links you do not want your site associated with, such as paid, sponsored or user-submitted links. That rarely describes a link to your own page.

If a page should not appear in search, such as a login or thank-you page, use a noindex tag on that page instead. If two pages are near duplicates, point one at the other with a canonical tag rather than hiding links.

How to add internal links to an existing site: 6 steps

Start with the pages that matter most, find related pages that already mention their topic, and link the words that are already there.

1. 1. List your most important pages

   Pick the pages you most want to rank: key product, service or feature pages, and guides that already get some search traffic. In Search Console, pages with impressions at positions 4 to 20 are good candidates, because a small push can move them up.

2. 2. Crawl the site

   Run a crawl to see how many internal links each page gets and how many clicks it sits from the home page. Note pages with no links (orphans), only one link, or a deep click depth.

3. 3. Fix broken and redirected links first

   Update internal links that return errors or go through redirects so they point straight at the live, final URL. Our broken links guide covers each case.

4. 4. Find related pages that mention the topic

   For each important page, search your site for its main phrase and close variants, for example with site:yourdomain.com "phrase" in Google. Pages that already talk about the topic are the natural places to link from.

5. 5. Add contextual links with descriptive anchor text

   Turn words that are already in the sentence into a link. Do not stuff new keyword phrases into text that reads fine. One or two well-placed links from relevant pages usually beat many links from unrelated ones.

6. 6. Connect hubs and check again

   Make sure each hub links to its detail pages and each detail page links back. Re-crawl after your changes to confirm the new links work and that important pages are closer to the home page.

How MrKeyword helps, and what it does not do

MrKeyword finds the internal linking problems and suggests links that use words already on your pages; you decide and make the edits.

• Internal link suggestions. The internal linking tool takes pages that rank at positions 4 to 20 in Search Console, or that two or fewer pages link to, and finds sentences on your other pages that already contain one of their search queries. Each suggestion names the page to edit and the exact words to link.
• Site Audit. The crawl behind the free site audit flags orphan pages from your sitemap, pages more than 3 clicks deep, pages with only one internal link, broken internal links, internal links that point at redirects, and noindex pages you still link to.
• Broken link checker. The free broken link checker tests every link on a single page, internal and external.

What it does not do: MrKeyword does not edit your site or insert links for you, and it does not write new anchor text. Suggestions only use phrases already on your pages, and they need a Site Audit crawl plus a connected Search Console property.

Questions and answers