Internal links are the most underused lever in SEO. Unlike backlinks, you control every one of them — and they decide how ranking signals flow through your site, which pages Google thinks are important, and whether your best content ever gets discovered at all.
Why internal links matter
Three jobs at once. They help Google discover pages (crawlers follow links to find URLs). They pass authority — a link from a strong page lends some of its weight to the target. And they signal relationships and importance — a page linked from many relevant places reads as a priority. A page with no internal links pointing to it is telling Google it doesn't matter.
Site structure and depth
Aim for a shallow, logical structure where important pages are reachable within about three clicks from the homepage. The deeper a page sits, the less often it's crawled and the weaker the signal it receives. A hub-and-spoke model works well: pillar pages link out to detailed articles, and those articles link back to the pillar and across to each other. This blog does exactly that — the on-page checklist acts as a hub linking to the specific tag guides.
Anchor text
The clickable text of a link tells Google what the target page is about. Use descriptive, varied anchors — "learn how canonical tags work" beats "click here". Don't use the exact same keyword-rich anchor for every internal link to a page; natural variation reads better to both users and search engines. Reserve your most descriptive anchors for your most important targets.
Orphan pages
An orphan page has no internal links pointing to it. It might be in your sitemap, but with nothing linking to it, Google struggles to discover it and reads it as unimportant — a frequent cause of "crawled – currently not indexed". Every page you care about should be linked from at least one other relevant page. Finding orphans usually means comparing your sitemap against your actual internal link graph.
How many links per page
Google dropped the old "100 links per page" limit years ago, but the spirit holds: a page stuffed with hundreds of links passes diluted signal through each one and is harder to use. Link where it genuinely helps the reader. In-content contextual links carry more weight than a wall of footer links. Quality and relevance over raw count.
Auditing internal links
Start at the page level: which links does a given page actually contain, and are any of them broken or pointing at redirects? SEO Inspector extracts every link on the current page — internal and external — and flags the ones returning errors or redirects, so you can keep your link graph clean one page at a time and stop quietly linking to dead URLs.
