What they do for search
Search engines discover pages by following links. A page that nothing links to (an orphan page) may never be crawled. Internal links also pass ranking value between pages, so pages linked from the homepage and other strong pages tend to do better, and the anchor text tells search engines what the target page is about.
Linking well
Link where it helps the reader: from a guide to the tool it mentions, from a product page to its category, from a comparison to both products. Use descriptive anchor text rather than "click here". Keep important pages within a few clicks of the homepage.
Common problems
Links to pages that redirect, or that no longer exist, waste crawling and frustrate visitors; update them to the final address. Too many links on one page dilute each one. Navigation built only with JavaScript that crawlers cannot follow hides pages.
Internal links and new pages
A new page gets found and ranked faster when existing pages link to it. When you publish a guide or tool, add links to it from the most related pages already on the site, not only from the sitemap. Search engines treat a page linked from many places on a site as more important than one linked from nowhere.
Example
A launch guide links to the tagline checker where it discusses taglines, and the tagline checker links back to the guide; both pages gain visitors and crawl paths.
Questions people ask
- How many internal links should a page have?
- As many as are useful to a reader. There is no fixed number; links that help someone continue are the right ones.
- Should internal links be nofollow?
- No. Nofollow on your own internal links stops value flowing between your pages and gains nothing.
Related terms
- Anchor textAnchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link. Search engines read it as a short description of the page the link points to.
- Link equityLink equity is the ranking value a link passes from one page to another. It depends on the linking page's own strength, its relevance and how the link is marked.
- Crawl budgetCrawl budget is the number of URLs a search engine is willing and able to fetch from your site in a given time. It matters most for large sites and sites with many low value URLs.
- Broken linkA broken link is a link that leads to a page that no longer works, usually returning a 404 or another error, because the page was moved, deleted or mistyped.
- XML sitemapAn XML sitemap is a file that lists the URLs you want search engines to crawl and index, optionally with the date each page last changed.