What is internal linking?
Internal linking is the practice of linking from one page on a site to another page on the same site, helping readers and crawlers move between related content.
Every link from one page to another on the same domain is a small vote of relevance, and a map of how the site itself thinks its content relates.
Internal links are one of the few visibility signals a site fully controls. Links from other sites depend on someone else deciding to grant them, but internal links are entirely up to the site owner. A page that nothing else on the site links to is effectively telling both crawlers and readers that it's unimportant, no matter how good the content on it actually is.
The common failure is linking opportunistically, wherever a word happens to match, rather than deliberately connecting pages that genuinely support each other. That produces a web of links that looks thorough on a site audit but doesn't actually group related pages together, which is worse for a reader trying to go deeper and worse for a system trying to work out what the site covers in real depth.
Related
- Topic clusterA topic cluster is a group of pages built around one subject, anchored by a broad hub page and linked to a set of narrower supporting pages that all link back to it and to each other.
- Crawl budgetCrawl budget is how much crawling a search engine is willing to spend on your site. On a new or low-authority domain it is small, which is why publishing more pages can reduce how many get indexed.
- IndexationIndexation is whether a search engine has stored your page and is willing to return it. Being crawled is not the same as being indexed, and being indexed is not the same as ranking.
Want to know where you actually stand on this? Run a free visibility check or try the free tools.