Internal linking

What an internal link actually passes

Three separate things, and it's worth keeping them apart because different link placements do them in different amounts.

1. Discovery. A crawler finds pages by following links. A page linked from nowhere is an orphan page — it may be in your sitemap and still get crawled rarely, because nothing on the site suggests it matters.
2. Context. The anchor text and the sentence around it tell Google what the target page is about. This is the only link context on the internet you fully control.
3. Authority. Link equity flows along internal links the same way it flows between sites. Your homepage usually holds the most; every link out of it passes a share downward.

Contextual links versus navigation links

Your header, footer and sidebar links appear on every page. Google has been discounting site-wide boilerplate for a very long time — a link that exists on 400 pages is not evidence that any one of those pages endorses the target.

A contextual link is different. It sits inside a paragraph, in the middle of an argument, surrounded by text on the same topic, with anchor text a human chose. That's the link that carries weight.

The practical consequence is unglamorous: adding your new service page to the footer is not an internal linking strategy. Linking to it from the three existing pages that already rank for adjacent queries is.

• Header/nav: structural. Keep it short. It should reflect how the business is organised, not every page you'd like ranked.
• Footer: useful for legal, contact and hub pages. Stuffing forty keyword-anchored links here is a very old tactic that hasn't worked in a decade.
• Contextual body links: where the work is. Editorial, specific, varied anchor text.
• Breadcrumbs: hierarchy-aware and automatic. See breadcrumb navigation for why they're underrated.

The two numbers: density and depth

Three to eight contextual links per 1,000 words. Our house target, not a Google rule, and it has a reason at both ends. Below three, a long page becomes a terminus — the reader finishes and leaves, the crawler has nowhere to go. Above eight or so, the links stop reading as editorial and each one carries proportionally less.

Three clicks from the homepage. The three-click rule began as a usability heuristic and has never been a Google ranking rule — anyone saying otherwise is repeating folklore. What is true is that click depth correlates with crawl frequency: pages buried eight clicks deep get crawled less, get updates indexed later, and look unimportant because your own structure says they are.

Both are targets, not laws. A 3,000-word pillar with fifteen useful links to its cluster is fine. A 600-word page with fifteen is not.

The 30-minute monthly internal linking routine

This is a calendar item, not a project. Once a month, half an hour, in this order.

1. Open Search Console, Performance, last 3 months. Sort pages by impressions, not clicks. The top ten are your strongest pages — these are the ones whose links are worth something.
2. List everything you published in the last month. For each new page, find two or three of those strong pages that could naturally mention it, and add a contextual link with descriptive anchor text.
3. Run a site:yourdomain.com "topic phrase" search for the topic of each new page. It surfaces older pages that discuss it and have no link — that's your fastest set of wins.
4. Check the reverse direction: does each new page link out to three to eight relevant pages? Cluster pages should always link back to their pillar.
5. Crawl the site (any crawler will do) and pull the list of pages with zero inbound internal links. Fix the ones that matter, delete or merge the ones that don't.
6. Skim your anchor text for repeats. If eleven pages all link to one target with the identical phrase, vary a few — different phrasings help you cover more query variants.