What is Internal Linking?
Internal linking is the practice of linking from one page of a site to another page of the same site. The links help visitors move through the site and help search engines find pages and understand how they relate.
Why it matters
Google says it uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl. Internal links are the part of that you fully control. They decide which pages are easy to discover, which pages receive the value that arrives from outside, and how clearly the topics of your site fit together. A page that nothing links to can be hard for search engines to find, however good its content is.
What makes good internal linking
Good internal linking starts with links that are crawlable: Google generally parses links that are an anchor element with an href attribute. The anchor text describes the target page in a way that makes sense to people and to search engines. Links sit where they help a reader, from relevant pages to the pages you want to build up, and no important page is left without a link pointing to it. The structure follows the way the topics relate, so that the path between related pages is short.
Types of internal links
Navigation links
Links in menus, footers and breadcrumbs. They appear on many pages and give a consistent route to the main sections.
Contextual links
Links inside the body of a page, placed where the sentence refers to another page. They are usually the most descriptive links on a site.
Hub and topic links
A hub page links to the pages that cover its subtopics, and those pages link back. It groups related content and makes the relationship clear.
Example
A guide about link building mentions anchor text in one of its paragraphs and links that phrase to a dedicated page about it, using a descriptive anchor. The reader gets the explanation they need, and the target page gets a relevant link from a related page.
Internal linking and Orbink
A placement bought on Orbink points to a target URL you choose when you order. The internal links on your own site then decide how the value that reaches that page is passed on to the rest of the site.
Analyze Your Internal LinksSources
Frequently Asked Questions
Google gives no number. A page should have the links that help readers move to related content, and no more. Too many links on a page can make each one less useful.
Internal links are one of the ways value moves between the pages of a site, and Google uses links to discover pages and as a signal. Linking from strong pages to the ones you want to rank helps distribute it.
An orphan page is a page that no other page of the site links to. Search engines may find it hard to discover, so it should be linked from at least one relevant page.
Anchor text should describe the target page. Using a relevant phrase is natural, but repeating the same exact keyword mechanically across many links is less useful than varied, descriptive wording.