Internal Linking Strategy: Distributing Authority Across Your Pages

Internal linking is the deliberate planning of links between the pages on your own site. It helps visitors find their next step and tells Google what each page is about and which pages matter most.

It is one of the quickest wins in an audit, yet one of the most neglected. Here is the framework I use, from anchor text and orphan pages to menu links and auditing.

Short answer: A good internal linking strategy links to important pages from within content, using anchor text that describes the target page, and leaves no important page orphaned or buried too deep. Google uses links both to discover pages and as a relevance signal.

Why do internal links matter to Google?

Google's link best practices documentation is clear: Google uses links as a signal when determining the relevance of pages and to find new pages to crawl. The same document says every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site.

The technical requirement is simple too: Google can generally only crawl a link reliably if it is an a element with an href attribute. Buttons wired to a JavaScript click event, or elements without an href, may not count as links.

<!-- Crawlable -->
<a href="/en/guides/teknik-seo">technical SEO guide</a>

<!-- Not reliably crawlable -->
<span onclick="go('/en/guides/teknik-seo')">Read more</span>
<a onclick="go('/en/guides/teknik-seo')">Read more</a>

Rendering and crawlability are covered in the technical SEO guide.

How should you write anchor text?

According to Google, good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to the page it is on. Generic phrases like “click here” say nothing about the target, and keyword stuffing violates Google's spam policies.

Natural variety is enough internally: you can link to the same page with different phrases that still carry the topic. Managing anchor text in external backlinks is a separate subject, covered in the anchor text strategy article.

Menu, footer and in-content links: what is the difference?

Not every link does the same job. Menus and footers make a site navigable; in-content links carry context. I plan them together:

In e-commerce, the balance between category, filter and product links matters even more; see the e-commerce SEO guide.

How do orphan pages and click depth cause problems?

These are the four internal link problems I see most often:

Some pages in the “Crawled – currently not indexed” list are simply pages with weak internal links, as explained in the article on crawled but not indexed pages. On large sites, depth and parameter waste also tie directly into crawl budget.

How do you send authority to your important pages?

On most sites, external links land mainly on the homepage and a few popular blog posts. Adding contextual links from those pages to the service or category pages that convert is the most practical way to move strength where it is needed.

The Links report in Search Console shows which pages earn the most external links. Then find paragraphs on those pages where a link to the related service fits naturally. How pillar and cluster pages should link is covered in topical authority and the pillar-cluster model; the wider content planning framework is in the content strategy guide.

How do you audit internal links step by step?

If a migration left many old URLs, you can draft redirects with the redirect rule generator; updating internal links to the new addresses is still the real fix.

• Every important page gets at least one in-content link
• Anchor text describes the target page
• No internal links to 404s or redirects
• Priority pages are a few clicks from the homepage
• Links are a elements with href, not JavaScript events

On stores with thousands of products I run this audit regularly as part of e-commerce SEO consulting. To review your internal linking together, see SEO consulting or get in touch.

8+ years of hands-on SEO and GEO experience across 150+ projects in e-commerce, SaaS, healthcare and local business sectors. Writes based on real client data, not theory.