Internal linking is the practice of linking from one page on your website to another page on the same website. Internal links serve two purposes: they help users navigate to related content, and they distribute 'link equity' (ranking authority) from high-authority pages to other pages that need ranking support. Strategic internal linking — using descriptive anchor text, linking from high-traffic pages to underperforming pages, and maintaining a logical site hierarchy — is one of the most immediately impactful technical SEO techniques available without external dependencies.
Most websites have a significant internal linking problem: the homepage and top-level navigation pages receive enormous link equity from external backlinks, but this authority is never efficiently distributed to the deeper pages that need ranking support. Blog articles sit as orphans with no links from the main service pages. Product pages lack links from the informational content that earns the most external links. This disconnection is a wasted opportunity that strategic internal linking corrects.
Internal linking best practices
- Use descriptive anchor text — link text should describe the content of the destination page ('conversion rate optimisation services' not 'click here')
- Link from high-authority pages — your homepage and most-linked pages should distribute authority through links to important deeper pages
- Maintain a flat hierarchy — important pages should be reachable within 3 clicks from the homepage
- Link related content — link blog articles to relevant service pages and other related articles
- Fix orphan pages — every page should have at least one internal link pointing to it
- Audit broken internal links — 404 errors from broken internal links waste link equity and damage user experience
- Use breadcrumb navigation — structured breadcrumbs improve both user navigation and link equity distribution
There is no definitive answer to the optimal number of internal links per page. Google's guidelines suggest that excessively large numbers of links on a single page may dilute the value passed to each linked destination. A practical approach: ensure every page links to the most relevant and commercially important related pages (typically three to eight links per article, more for hub or pillar pages), use contextual in-text links rather than footer link dumps, and avoid linking to the same page multiple times with different anchor text on a single page.
PageRank is Google's original algorithm for assigning authority to web pages based on the quantity and quality of links pointing to them. Internal links pass a portion of a page's PageRank to the pages it links to — which is why linking from your highest-PageRank pages (typically the homepage and pages with many external backlinks) to important but less-linked pages is strategically valuable. While Google no longer discusses PageRank publicly, the underlying principle — links pass authority — remains fundamental to how Google evaluates and ranks pages.