Businesses publish ninety posts, link none of them to each other, then wonder why the blog gets no traffic. Internal linking is free, entirely within your control, and the most neglected thing in most content programmes.
Internal links tell search engines which of your pages matter and what they are about. A page with one inbound link gets crawled rarely and inherits almost no authority. Group related content into clusters, link them to each other and to the service page they support, and use descriptive anchor text rather than click here.
What internal links do
- Discovery. Crawlers follow links. A page nothing links to is found late and revisited rarely.
- Authority distribution. Links pass ranking signals around your site. Pages nothing links to get almost none.
- Context. Anchor text and surrounding content tell search engines what the target page is about.
- Topical grouping. Clusters of interlinked pages signal depth on a subject rather than one-off coverage.
The hub and spoke model
Pick the commercial page you want to rank, usually a service page. That is the hub. Every supporting article is a spoke that links back to it, and spokes on related subjects link to each other.
| Hub | Spokes |
|---|---|
| Web design and development service page | Website costs, how long a build takes, choosing an agency, design briefs, launch checklists |
| Shopify service page | Store launch checklist, theme speed, product page SEO, app selection, migration |
| UI and UX service page | UX research, design systems, usability testing, accessibility |
The effect is cumulative. Fifteen articles pointing at one service page do considerably more for it than fifteen articles pointing nowhere.
Anchor text
- Describe the destination. Website design costs beats click here or this article.
- Vary the wording naturally rather than repeating one exact phrase everywhere.
- Link from within sentences where the link is relevant, not only from a related posts block at the bottom.
- Do not link the same phrase to two different pages, since that competes with itself.
How many links, and where
There is no magic number. Three to eight contextual links in a long article is normal, placed where they genuinely help rather than sprinkled to hit a count.
Links high in the page tend to carry more weight than ones in a footer, and links inside body content carry more than ones in navigation, largely because navigation appears everywhere and body links are a deliberate editorial choice.
Finding your orphans
Crawl your site and list every page with zero or one inbound internal link. On most content-heavy sites the result is uncomfortable: the majority of blog posts turn out to be linked only from the blog index.
Fix the highest-value ones first: pages targeting commercial terms, and pages that already get some traffic and could get more.
Frequently asked questions
How many internal links should a page have?
Enough to be useful, typically three to eight contextual links in a long article. There is no threshold that triggers a penalty, but links added to hit a number rather than to help a reader tend to be obvious and ineffective.
What is anchor text and does it matter?
Anchor text is the clickable words in a link. It matters because it tells search engines what the destination is about. Descriptive anchors outperform generic ones like click here, which say nothing about the target.
What is an orphan page?
A page with no internal links pointing to it. Orphans get crawled rarely, inherit almost no authority, and frequently fail to rank regardless of quality. They are usually easy to fix once you know they exist.
Should I link to old blog posts?
Yes, and it is one of the highest-return jobs available. When you publish, add links from relevant existing posts to the new one and from the new one back. Otherwise every post you publish starts isolated.
Do internal links help more than backlinks?
No, backlinks are more powerful. Internal links are entirely under your control and free, which usually makes them the better place to start. Most sites have more to gain from fixing internal linking than from a small number of new external links.