What an internal link does
Internal links do three jobs at once, and it's worth separating them because a link can do one well and the others badly.
- Discovery — a crawler finds pages by following links, so an unlinked page is nearly invisible regardless of your sitemap
- Value — pages pass a share of their standing to what they link to, so linking concentrates or dilutes importance
- Meaning — the anchor text tells the engine what the destination is about, in your own words
Anchor text
The clickable words are a description of the destination. "Click here" and "read more" describe nothing, and they're also poor for anyone navigating by links with a screen reader — the same fix serves both.
| Anchor | Problem |
|---|---|
| "Click here" | Describes nothing; useless out of context |
| "our guide" | Describes the format, not the subject |
| "what is a conversion rate" | None — says exactly what's at the other end |
| The same exact phrase on forty links | Reads as manipulation, and stops being informative |
Vary the phrasing naturally. Writing the sentence first and then linking the words that already describe the destination gets this right without thinking about it.
Structure: depth and hubs
Click depth is how many links from the homepage a page sits. Deep pages get crawled less and valued less. On a small site, nothing should be more than three clicks from the homepage.
The reliable pattern is a hub: one page covering a topic broadly, linking out to every specific page under it, with each of those linking back. It gives the crawler a complete map of the topic and tells it which page is the entry point.
/learning (section entry) /learning/topics/search (hub — links to all six) /learning/lessons/what-is-seo /learning/lessons/what-is-geo /learning/lessons/what-is-aeo /learning/lessons/crawling-and-indexing-explained ... each links back to the hub, and sideways to siblingsOrphans and dead ends
An orphan page has no internal links pointing at it. It's usually a page created for a campaign, or one whose parent was redesigned away. It exists, it's in the sitemap, and nothing on the site suggests it matters.
- List every URL in your sitemapThat's the set of pages you claim to want indexed.
- Crawl your own site from the homepageFree crawlers do this. Collect every URL reachable by following links.
- Subtract the second list from the firstWhat remains is orphaned. Each one is either worth linking to, or worth deleting.
- Do the reverse tooPages reachable but not in the sitemap are usually pages you forgot you published.
The other half of this is dead ends: pages with no outbound links. A reader who finishes and has nowhere to go leaves, and a crawler that arrives learns nothing new. Every page should offer at least one sensible next step.
Common mistakes
- "Click here" and "read more" as anchor text
- The same exact anchor phrase repeated across dozens of links
- Important pages buried four or five clicks from the homepage
- Hand-authoring related links, which go stale silently
- Linking every mention of a term on a page, which dilutes all of them
Key takeaways
- Internal links drive discovery, distribute value, and describe destinations
- Anchor text should say what's at the other end, and vary naturally
- Hubs plus a three-click maximum depth is enough structure for a small site
- Orphan pages are found by subtracting a crawl from your sitemap
Try it yourself
Pick your most important page and count how many other pages on your site link to it. If the answer is one or zero, that's the finding — and adding three contextual links from related pages is an afternoon's work with a real effect.