Internal links are hyperlinks between pages on the same website, from navigation menus and footers to links inside the body of an article. They help search engines discover pages, understand how pages relate to one another, and judge which pages the site treats as important. For readers, they are the path from an educational article to the product, pricing or comparison page that turns a visit into a customer.
Why internal links matter
Google finds most new pages by following links. A page with no internal links pointing to it, an orphan page, may be found only through a sitemap, and is harder for Google to place in context. Links also pass signals: a page that many relevant pages link to looks more central to the site than one linked only from the footer.
The words used to link, the anchor text, tell Google what the destination page is about. A link that says “expense approval workflows” is more informative than one that says “click here”.
Contextual links do the heavy lifting
Navigation and footer links appear on every page and say little about any specific relationship. Links inside the body copy, placed where a reader would naturally want more detail, carry more meaning. Google's documentation asks for links that are crawlable, meaning standard anchor elements with an href, and anchor text that describes the target.
<!-- Crawlable and descriptive -->
<a href="/integrations/salesforce">sync approvals to Salesforce</a>
<!-- Not reliably crawlable -->
<span onclick="goTo('/integrations/salesforce')">here</span>An internal linking routine for SaaS sites
- Every new article links to at least one relevant product, feature or use-case page, and to its pillar page if it belongs to a cluster.
- When you publish a page, go back and add links to it from older related pages. New pages rarely get links unless someone adds them.
- Link bottom-of-funnel pages (comparisons, alternatives, pricing) from the high-traffic guides that lead into them.
- Use Search Console's Links report or a crawler to find important pages with few internal links.
Example
Connecting a popular guide to the product
A made-up contract tool, Clausely, has a guide to writing a mutual NDA that draws steady search traffic, but it links only to other blog posts.
Adding a line where the guide discusses templates, “you can start from Clausely's NDA template and send it for e-signature”, with a link to the template page, and a link from the section on reviewing redlines to the redlining feature page, gives readers a next step and tells Google which product pages are related to the topic.
Common mistakes
Links hidden behind JavaScript
Menus and buttons that navigate through click handlers rather than href links may not be followed. Use real anchor elements for anything you want crawled.
Same generic anchor everywhere
Dozens of “learn more” and “read more” links give no information about their destinations. Describe the target in the link text.
Forgetting older pages
Publishing without updating related existing pages leaves new content weakly linked for months.
Questions
There is no ideal number. Link where it helps the reader. A page with hundreds of links dilutes the meaning of each; a page with none leaves readers and crawlers at a dead end.
Rarely. Adding nofollow to your own internal links to steer link equity, sometimes called PageRank sculpting, does not work as people hoped. If a page should not be indexed, use noindex instead.
