Internal linking is the cheapest SEO fix we know of. Free, mostly. No backlinks to chase, no new content to write, just pointing your own pages at each other properly. And yet on most small business sites we audit, the service pages that make money get linked from the menu and nowhere else, while some 2021 blog post about “5 tips for Diwali” has fourteen links pointing at it for reasons nobody remembers. Below is how we sort that out, what Google has said about links in its own documentation, and the one study worth knowing about. We’ve skipped the made-up “40% better crawling” type stats that float around this topic, because we couldn’t find where any of them came from.
Key takeaways
- Google says every page you care about needs a link from at least one other page on your site.
- Links should be plain
<a href>tags. Google may not follow JavaScript-only links. - Crawl budget rarely matters for small sites. Google’s guide on it targets sites with roughly 10,000+ pages changing daily or a million-plus changing weekly.
- Varied, descriptive anchor text lined up with more clicks in Zyppy’s study of 23 million internal links.
- Send links to money pages first. Blog posts should feed service and product pages.
What does internal linking do for SEO?
Two jobs. Links are how Google finds your pages in the first place, and they’re also a hint about which pages you think matter, since a page linked from the homepage and twenty blog posts is clearly more important to you than one linked from a forgotten tag archive.
Google is blunt about the first part. Its link best practices page says “every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site.” Sitemaps help Google discover URLs, sure, but a page sitting in the sitemap with no links pointing to it is sending a pretty mixed message.
Does crawl budget matter for your site?
Probably not. Google’s crawl budget guide is aimed at sites with roughly a million unique pages changing weekly, or around 10,000 changing daily, plus sites with lots of URLs stuck as “discovered, currently not indexed” in Search Console. A 60-page clinic website isn’t on that list.
Be wary, then. An agency pitching “crawl budget optimisation” to a small business is usually selling a fix for a problem you don’t have. For most sites the real problem is simpler and duller, because the important pages sit three or four clicks deep with hardly anything linking to them and Google takes the hint.
How many internal links should a page have?
No magic number. Google says so in as many words, and its guidance just notes that if a page feels like it has too many links, it probably does.
Most useful data we’ve seen comes from Zyppy, who looked at 23 million internal links across about 1,800 websites and matched them against Search Console clicks. URLs with 40 to 44 internal links got around four times the clicks of URLs with 0 to 4. Past roughly 45 to 50 links the trend reversed, which the authors put down partly to sitewide menu links pointing at low-traffic pages. Correlation, not proof. Still a decent rule of thumb for a page you care about: more than a handful, nowhere near hundreds.
What anchor text should you use?
Words that describe the page you’re linking to. Google’s own test is to read the anchor text on its own and see whether it still makes sense, which rules out “click here” and “read more” straight away.
Zyppy’s data pointed the same way. Pages linked with a wider variety of anchor text got more Google clicks, and in that data URLs with at least one exact-match anchor got at least five times more traffic than those without. Don’t take that as licence to use the identical keyword phrase fifty times. Mix it up the way a person would, so one post says “dental implant cost in Jaipur”, another “what implants cost”, a third “our implant pricing page”, and Google gets a fuller picture of what the page covers.
Which pages should get the most internal links?
Whichever ones make money. Service pages, product categories, the booking page. Those should be the most linked-to pages on your site after the homepage, and on a lot of small business sites they’re nowhere close because every blog post links to other blog posts and stops there.
Simple fix. Go through your ten most-visited blog posts (Search Console will tell you which) and add a contextual link from each one to the service page it relates to, in a sentence where it reads naturally. A post on root canal pain should mention your root canal treatment page. A post on GST registration should point at the GST service. Half an hour’s work, and in our experience it’s one of the quicker ranking wins going.
What are orphan pages and how do you find them?
Pages nothing links to. They usually come from old campaigns, landing pages built for ads, or posts that dropped off the blog’s first page and were never linked again.
Finding them takes two lists. Crawl your site with Screaming Frog (the free version covers 500 URLs), export every URL it found by following links, then compare that against your XML sitemap or the indexed pages in Search Console. Anything in the second list but missing from the first is an orphan. Then decide page by page: link to it from somewhere sensible, merge it into a stronger page, or redirect it if it’s dead.
Which internal linking mistakes hurt most?
Mostly the invisible ones, the stuff nobody sees from the front end. A few we run into constantly:
- JavaScript-only links. Buttons wired up with onclick and no href. Google says it generally only crawls links that are proper <a> elements with an href.
- Links pointing at redirects. After a redesign, half the internal links often go through a 301 first. Update them to the final URL.
- Nofollow on internal links. Some SEO plugins add it to whole menus. There’s rarely a good reason.
- Footers stuffed with 60 keyword links. “Plumber Jaipur, plumber Malviya Nagar, plumber Vaishali Nagar…” It looks spammy because it is.
Our post on SEO errors that quietly cut traffic covers a few more of these.
How do you audit internal links in an afternoon?
- Crawl the site and sort pages by inlinks. Your money pages should be near the top. If they aren’t, that’s your first job.
- Check crawl depth. Anything important more than three clicks from the homepage needs a shorter route.
- Pull the orphan list using the sitemap comparison above.
- Filter for internal links returning 3xx or 4xx and fix them at the source.
- Scan anchor text for “click here”, “read more” and naked URLs, and rewrite the ones on important pages.
- Add contextual links from your top ten blog posts to the matching service pages.
If the structure itself is the problem (buried categories, a menu all over the place) our guide to website architecture for SEO is the next step, and the technical SEO audit guide covers the rest of the crawl.
Frequently Asked Questions
Links between your own pages. They help Google find your pages and understand which ones you consider important, and they help visitors get from a blog post to the service or product they need. Menus count, but links inside the text tend to carry more context.
They can. Pages with more internal links pointing at them tended to get more Google clicks in Zyppy’s data on 23 million links across about 1,800 sites, though that’s only correlation. The bigger effect is usually getting neglected pages found and crawled at all.
Enough to help the reader. For a typical 1,500-word post that’s often somewhere between three and eight contextual links, at least one of them to a relevant service or product page. Google doesn’t set a number. If a paragraph starts to feel like a list of links, cut some.
Almost never. Nofollow tells Google not to pass signals through that link, which on your own site mostly just hides pages from yourself. The old trick of nofollowing login or contact pages to “sculpt” PageRank stopped working years ago, and these days plugins that add nofollow to menus by default do more harm than good. If a page shouldn’t be in search, use noindex on the page itself. If it should be there, just link to it normally. The one sensible exception is user-generated content like comments, where you don’t control the links being added.
Depends on size. On big sites with hundreds of posts they save real time spotting link opportunities, but on a small site you can do the whole job by hand in an afternoon. Either way, check every suggested link reads naturally before accepting it.
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Pooja Garg
Pooja Garg is the founder of Sky Storm Digital, a creative digital marketing agency dedicated to helping brands grow through strategy, storytelling, and design. With a passion for blending creativity and data-driven insight, Pooja writes about digital marketing trends, brand building, and the ever-evolving online landscape.
When she’s not crafting campaigns, she’s exploring new ways to connect creativity with technology.
