Internal Linking for SEO: Best Practices

Internal links are one of the few parts of SEO you control entirely: which pages link where, how often and with what words. Used well, they show Google which of your pages matter and help buyers reach them.

Internal linking is the practice of linking the pages of your own website to each other, so that visitors and search engines can find their way around and see which pages belong together.

An internal link is a hyperlink from one page to another page on the same domain. Users follow internal links to find their way around, and Google follows them to crawl your website and work out how it fits together.

An external link points from one website to another, and the ones that point to yours are backlinks. We cover those in our guide to off-page SEO.

Internal links are also by far the more common kind. According to the HTTP Archive’s 2025 Web Almanac, the median desktop page has 43 links to the same website and just six to other websites.

Internal links show Google how your pages fit together, which pages matter most and how to reach them. There are four reasons to spend time on them.

When you link from page A to page B, you tell Google the two are related, and across the whole website those links show search engines how it is structured.

If the paragraph around the link and the anchor text on page A are relevant to the keyword page B is meant to rank for, that tends to give page B a lift. It backs up the on-page work already done on page B.

You decide how link equity, the authority a page passes on through its links, flows around your website. When page A links to page B, a share of page A’s link equity passes to page B.

The more internal links page B has, and the stronger the pages they come from, the more equity it receives, and that tends to go with better rankings. Up to a point, though: pages with a very large number of internal links usually get them from the menu and footer, and those carry less weight than links from relevant paragraphs.

Links that take visitors to the next thing they need, such as the service page behind a blog post or the contact page behind a case study, make the website easier to use and shorten the path to an enquiry.

Google’s crawlers follow links to find and index pages. A page with no internal links pointing to it, known as an orphan page, can still be found through an XML sitemap, for example, but it tends to rank worse. Our article on crawl budget goes into how Google decides what to crawl.

Internal links matter for AI search for the same reasons they matter for Google. They are the paths between your pages, and they decide what gets found and in what context it is understood.

Google has not said exactly how AI Overviews choose their sources. But the answers are built on pages Google has already found, indexed and placed within a topic, and a page that nothing else on the website links to is hard to find and harder still to place in context.

An AI answer usually sums up a whole topic rather than a single keyword, so what counts is how well your pages on the same topic link to each other, in both directions:

• A broad guide links down to the pages that go into depth.
• Each in-depth page links back up to the guide.
• Pages on the same topic link sideways to each other where it helps the reader.

It is the same idea as the pillar pages and topic clusters further down, and it worked for ordinary SEO long before anyone talked about AI search.

Internal links are usually split into structural links, which sit in the site’s templates, and contextual links, which sit in the copy. These are the places worth using.

• Main navigation: A link in the main menu appears on every page, in a prominent position at the top. Pages linked from here tend to be among the strongest on the site.

Navigation often differs between desktop and mobile, so check both versions of the website.

• Footer: Also on every page, but further down, so footer links carry less weight than menu links. They are still useful internal links.

The footer is also where people look for contact details, so what it says and where it links matters for enquiries as well as for SEO.

• Sidebars: Not every website has them; they are most common on blogs and online shops. They rarely appear on every page, but they sit in a more prominent position than the footer, so they can pass a good share of link equity and relevance.
• Breadcrumbs: Common on online shops and product catalogues, and useful on any larger website with several levels, such as a manufacturer’s product ranges or a services firm’s practice areas. They help Google understand the structure and give each link a natural anchor text.
• Body copy: Done well, these links carry the strongest contextual relevance, and how much they pass depends on where they sit. A link that visitors actually click, high up on the page, in a relevant paragraph and with anchor text that matches page B’s keyword, is the kind that helps rankings most.

Internal linking is easiest to get right when it is planned at the design stage, before the templates and menus are fixed.

The footer, menu and breadcrumbs appear on almost every page, so each decision there carries more weight than a single link in a blog post.

The link equity on a page is shared between all the links on it. Add a link to a global template and you add one more link to every page on the website, and it takes a slice of what the other links would have received.

Footers easily grow into a table of contents, with policy documents, old campaign pages and every subcategory. Compare two footers on otherwise identical websites. Footer 1 links to the contact page, the about page and your three most important service pages. Footer 2 has 80 links to everything you have ever published. In footer 1, the service pages get far more of the link equity, because it isn’t shared with dozens of pages that never lead to business.

It isn’t black and white. Large websites with many strong external links usually cope well with broad menus and footers. Smaller websites have less link equity to share, and they tend to notice more when it is spread thin.

Breadcrumbs are links up the structure, from a product or service page to its category and on to the main section. They give Google the hierarchy, a natural anchor text and a shorter way back. Mark them up with BreadcrumbList structured data from Schema.org: Google still uses the markup for desktop results, although since January 2025 mobile results show only the domain.

Then there is the anchor text in menus and buttons. According to the WebAIM Million (2026), 15.2 per cent of the top one million home pages contain ambiguous link text such as “click here”. A link like that tells Google nothing about where it leads, and tells someone using a screen reader nothing either. Icon links without text should get an aria-label for the same reason.

Anchor text is the clickable text in a link, and it tells Google what the target page is about. The best anchor text is short and relevant, and includes the page’s keyword in full or in part. Aim for a natural spread of anchors, but you don’t need to be as careful as you would with links from other websites.

Avoid anchors that use unrelated words, or words another page is meant to rank for: that leads to keyword cannibalisation. If you do use a call to action such as “Read more”, make sure the paragraph around it is relevant to the target page.

Exact-match anchor text on internal links isn’t the risk it is with backlinks. In Zyppy’s study of 23 million internal links, pages with at least one exact-match anchor had at least five times more traffic than pages without, although that is a correlation rather than proof. More anchor variations also went with more traffic, but Zyppy has since added that some sites with very high anchor diversity may suffer. Mix the keyword with partial matches and natural phrasing that describes the same thing, without overdoing either.

When one page links to the same URL more than once, SEO tests have repeatedly suggested that Google only takes the anchor text of the first link into account. Google has not confirmed this.

If your service page sits in the main menu as “Services”, those tests suggest that may be the anchor text Google uses, and the far more useful “fire risk assessments” further down in the body copy may not have the same effect.

There are two ways to deal with it:

• Use descriptive menu labels where you can, such as “Fire Risk Assessments” rather than “Services”.
• Keep the main menu to the main pages, and let the deeper subpages get their links from body copy.

Linking to a #section of the page is sometimes suggested as a way round it, but Google generally doesn’t support URL fragments, and we know of no evidence that it works.

The quickest way to find relevant pages to link from is a site: search on Google, which only returns results from one domain. If you sell pallet racking, for example, search for: “site:yourcompany.co.uk pallet racking”. Every result that comes up is a candidate for an internal link.

Search Console gives you a slightly more thorough version, as long as it has been set up for at least a few weeks. It is really a method for finding keyword cannibalisation, but it works just as well for finding relevant paragraphs to link from.

• Log in to Google Search Console.
• Click “Search results” under Performance.

• Click “New”, then “Query”, and enter the keyword you want to look into.

• Open the “Pages” tab.

You can now see which pages appear on Google for the keyword. The list should be close to what the site: search gave you, so one of the two methods is enough.

Your strongest pages should link to your most important ones. A page becomes strong when it has many links pointing to it, from your own website, from other websites, or both. The home page usually has the most external links, and pages linked from the main menu, the footer and the home page tend to be relatively strong too.

To find the pages with the most external links, use Search Console, a paid SEO tool or Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker, which has a free version. In Search Console, open the Links report from the left-hand menu: the Top linked pages table under External links shows which of your pages other websites link to most, and “More” at the bottom of the table gives you the full list.

It is mainly followed links that pass value (a link is followed unless it carries nofollow or a similar attribute), and links from social media are usually nofollow. External links are also how you increase the total link equity your pages share, as long as they come from websites Google trusts.

For internal links, we use Screaming Frog. Crawl the website and sort the Internal tab by Inlinks or Unique Inlinks to see which pages get the most internal links; the Crawl Depth column shows how many clicks each page is from the start page. The free version stops at 500 URLs, so a larger website needs a paid licence.

Look at your competitors too. You can crawl any website. If a competitor is good at SEO, the number of internal links shows you which pages they prioritise.

Alongside your existing pages, plan new landing pages and articles as places to link from, and link to them from relevant paragraphs on the pages you already have.

A blog like this one gives you natural places to link from, so use them. You can link straight to the pages you want to rank, or to pages that in turn link to them.

Link to the other pages that matter to buyers as well, such as your case studies or your about page. Those links aren’t a ranking factor in themselves, but they help buyers who are weighing you up, and they tend to pay off over time.

Blog posts do more than carry links. They are also a way to show expertise and cover the subtopics around the keywords you want to rank for. If you want to rank for managed IT services, say, posts on Cyber Essentials certification, moving to Microsoft 365, backup policies or which level of support suits which size of business are good places to show what you know and link to the service page.

Pillar pages cover a whole topic rather than a narrow keyword, and the topic cluster is the group of more detailed pages around them. A pillar page can rank for a keyword, but it is usually a broad one, such as “workplace fire safety”.

Our post on on-page SEO, for example, doesn’t go deep into every part, but links to the pages that do. Pillar pages usually get internal links from every page in their cluster, which makes them a strong place to link to your most important commercial pages from.

Most internal linking advice comes down to what to avoid, and the most common mistakes are easy to fix.

Don’t use the same anchor text for links to different pages. It leaves Google unsure which page should rank for that keyword, and the same applies to anchors on different pages that share a search intent.

Always link directly to the page rather than to a redirect. Say page A links to page B, and page B then moves to page C. Page A still links to page B, which now has a 301 redirect to page C. It works for the visitor, and Google follows it.

Link equity usually passes through a 301 redirect without any noticeable loss, and a controlled split test by SearchPilot found no detectable short-term traffic uplift from fixing links like these. It is still worth pointing the link straight at the right page. It is good housekeeping and means fewer unnecessary requests to the server, but don’t put it ahead of the overall structure. Only on very large websites with a great many URLs does it start to matter for your crawl budget.

Link to the clean URL, not to a version with parameters. As we cover in our guide to technical SEO, internal links often point to pages such as /?q=pallet-racking rather than directly to the static page /pallet-racking.

Don’t add internal links to every page from every page. Link to everything and the links stop meaning anything, so put most of your links towards the pages that matter most.

We often see nofollow on internal links to pages such as the contact or about page. It doesn’t send more link equity to your other links. When Google last explained how this works, in 2009, nofollowed links still counted towards the page’s total number of links, so their share was simply not passed on. Since 2019 Google has treated nofollow as a hint and hasn’t said how it handles internal nofollow links today. Either way, leave nofollow off internal links unless you have a clear reason. If a page matters less to you, give it natural links to other relevant pages instead.

Click depth is the number of clicks it takes to reach a page from the home page, and in internal linking it is the clicks that count, not the folder structure in the URL. A page at /services/seo/ can be five clicks away if nothing links to it, while a page deep in the blog’s folder structure can be one click away if the home page links to it. Google’s John Mueller has said that what matters is how many links you have to click through to reach the content, not what the URL looks like.

Pages close to the home page, with many other pages pointing to them, are the ones Google tends to crawl more often and treat as more important. Take a fire safety firm’s service page for fire risk assessments. In version A, it is one click from the home page and gets links from five blog posts. In version B, the same page is five clicks away and can only be reached through a category page. Version A is the one Google will usually visit more often and value more highly.

Orphan pages are the extreme case: no link leads to them at all, and an XML sitemap gives them no link equity.

How to find them:

1. Crawl the website from the home page in Screaming Frog, without uploading the sitemap. That shows you the website the way Google’s crawlers find it through links.
2. Compare the crawl with your XML sitemap and with the pages that have impressions in Search Console.
3. Pages that are in the sitemap or in Search Console but missing from the crawl have no internal links.
4. If the page is worth keeping, give it links from relevant pages on the same topic. If it is out of date, remove it or 301 redirect it to the closest relevant page.
5. Check how deep your business-critical pages sit. If they are far down, give them links from pages close to the home page, or a place on a hub page for the topic.

On larger websites in particular, we often find internal links to 404 pages, pages that no longer exist. Those links pass internal link equity to pages that are gone, and they send visitors to a dead end. If your website runs on WordPress, there are plugins that check for broken links regularly and report them as they appear.

Whenever you remove a page or change its URL, update or remove every internal link pointing to it.

If you would like help reviewing click depth, orphan pages and broken links on your website, our SEO service covers all three.

If you only have an afternoon, start with three things: link from your strongest pages to the pages that bring in business, trim the menu and footer to what matters, and find the pages nothing links to.

• Link most to your most important pages
• Link from strong pages to important pages
• Place important internal links high up on the page
• Link from relevant paragraphs
• Use relevant anchor text that fits the search intent, and vary it naturally
• Don’t use the same anchor text for links to different pages
• Link from existing pages, and create new relevant content to link from
• Make the links easy to see and click
• Keep your most important pages within a few clicks of the home page
• Make sure every page you want to rank has internal links
• Keep the menu and footer to what matters for the business

The work is usually smaller than it looks. Work through the checklist yourselves, or bring in an SEO agency to do it with you. If you would like a second opinion first, book a free search audit: our founder, Nils, takes you through what we find in 30 minutes, and there is nothing to prepare.