Internal Links

TL;DR — Internal links are links from one page on your site to another page on the same site. They do two things: they help search engines find your pages, and they tell search engines which pages are important and what they’re about. Use descriptive link text (not “click here”), make sure every page you care about is linked from somewhere, and never add nofollow to your own internal links.

What an internal link is

An internal link is a link that goes from one page on your website to another page on the same website. A link that points to a different website is an external link. That’s the whole distinction.

In HTML, an internal link looks like any other link:

<a href="/blog/internal-links/">internal links</a>

The clickable words (“internal links” here) are the anchor text.

Why internal links matter

Two reasons, and they’re separate:

1. They help search engines find your pages. Google discovers most new pages by following links from pages it already knows about. If nothing on your site links to a page, Google probably won’t find it. A page like that — with zero internal links pointing to it — is called an orphan page, and it usually won’t rank. Evidence for this claim Google can reliably crawl standard anchor elements with href attributes, making internal links a discovery path. Scope: Google crawlable-link requirements. Confidence: high · Verified: 2026-07-14 Google Search Central: Crawlable links
2. They help your pages rank. Links pass “ranking strength” (Google’s name for the original version is PageRank) from one page to another. The more good internal links point to a page, the more important search engines think it is. The link text also tells them what the page is about.

Google’s John Mueller put it plainly: internal linking is “super critical for SEO… one of the biggest things that you can do on a website.”

How to do it well

• Use descriptive link text. “Email marketing guide” is better than “click here” or “read more.” It tells people — and search engines — what they’ll get. Evidence for this claim Google recommends descriptive, concise, relevant anchor text for internal links. Scope: Google anchor-text best practices. Confidence: high · Verified: 2026-07-14 Google Search Central: Anchor text
• Link from relevant pages. A link inside a paragraph of related content is worth more than one buried in the footer.
• Make sure every important page is linked. Google’s own advice: “Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site.”
• Keep important pages close to the homepage. If someone (or a crawler) has to click five times to reach a page, it’s probably getting ignored. Aim for your important pages to be reachable in a few clicks.
• Don’t nofollow your own internal links. This used to be a trick to “save” ranking strength for important pages. It hasn’t worked since 2009, and it actually wastes that strength. Just link normally.

The thing most people get wrong

There is no magic number of links a page should have. You’ll still hear the old “keep it under 100 links” rule — it’s a myth. Google says there’s “no magical ideal number.” Use common sense: if a page feels like it has too many links, it probably does.

Want the deeper version — how PageRank flows, why “sculpting” with nofollow backfires, hub-and-spoke strategy, and a real audit workflow? Switch to the Advanced tab.

TL;DR — Internal links do two distinct jobs: discovery (they’re the #1 way Googlebot finds URLs) and signal-passing (PageRank flows along them, and anchor text supplies topical context). Mueller calls internal linking “super critical for SEO.” To be crawlable, a link must be a real <a href> — not an onclick or a router attribute. There’s no documented max links per page (the 100-link rule is a myth), but linking every page to every other page destroys the hierarchy signal. Click depth is your most actionable metric: pages 4+ clicks deep get crawled and weighted less. Never nofollow internal links to sculpt PageRank — dead since 2009; the equity evaporates rather than redistributes. Highest-ROI audit fixes: orphan pages, then broken links, then click depth.

What counts as an internal link (and what’s crawlable)

An internal link points from one page on your site to another page on the same site. The technical requirement is the part people skip: to be crawlable by Google, it has to be a standard HTML anchor element with an href. Google is explicit — “Google can only crawl your link if it’s an <a> HTML element… with an href attribute.” Evidence for this claim Google can reliably crawl standard anchor elements with href attributes, making internal links a discovery path. Scope: Google crawlable-link requirements. Confidence: high · Verified: 2026-07-14 Google Search Central: Crawlable links

These are crawlable:

<a href="https://example.com/shoes/">Running shoes</a>
<a href="/products/category/shoes">Running shoes</a>

These are not crawlable, and they’re how a lot of JavaScript-framework sites quietly orphan their own pages:

<a routerLink="products/category">Shoes</a>          <!-- no href -->
<span href="https://example.com">Shoes</span>        <!-- not an anchor -->
<a onclick="goto('https://example.com')">Shoes</a>   <!-- onclick, no href -->

Martin Splitt’s exasperation on this is well earned: “There is an HTML link tag, you put a URL in the href, that’s how you link and I don’t know why people are reinventing the wheel.” If your “links” are click handlers, the page on the other end may never get discovered.

One nuance: Google does render JavaScript, and a link that only exists after client-side rendering can still be picked up — but rendering is a separate, later stage from the initial crawl. That’s not a reason to skip putting real href values in your source HTML. Rendering can eventually surface a link added by script; it can’t rescue a click handler that never gets a real href at all — that’s still outside the crawlable-link contract above.

The two jobs internal links do

This is the single most useful mental model on this page. Internal links serve two separate functions, and a page can have one without the other.

Job one — discovery. Internal links are the primary mechanism by which crawlers find new and updated URLs. Google: “The vast majority of the new pages Google finds every day are through links.” And: “Googlebot discovers new URLs to crawl primarily from links embedded in previously crawled pages.” This is why orphan pages are a discovery dead end — there’s no link for the crawler to follow.

Job two — passing ranking signals. Internal links pass PageRank, Google’s foundational link-based authority signal, from page to page. Mueller summarized both jobs at once: “Essentially, internal linking helps us on the one hand to find pages, so that’s really important. It also helps us to get a bit of context about that specific page.” The “context” comes from the anchor text and from where the page sits in your link graph.

A page can be discoverable (one link points to it) but still weak (only one link points to it). The two jobs scale independently.

PageRank still flows through internal links

Let’s kill a common doubt: PageRank is not dead. The public toolbar score was retired in 2016, but the internal algorithm is alive. Gary Illyes, in 2016: “Did you know that after 18 years we’re still using PageRank (and 100s of other signals) in ranking?” Mueller has confirmed Google computes PageRank for internal links the same way it does for external ones, and that more internal links to a page raise Google’s inferred importance for it.

The practical consequence: internal links are the lever you use to concentrate authority on your priority pages. As I’ve put it in my Pubcon Local 2021 talk, “internal links are links from one page on your site to another page on your site, and these also pass PageRank.” On the Ahrefs side, the rule of thumb is simple — the more internal links a page has, the higher its PageRank, and you direct the flow of PageRank around your site by choosing what to link.

One nuance worth knowing for local SEO: in my Pubcon Local 2021 talk on local link building, internal links seemed to matter more for local queries. My read is that local search has fewer external link signals to go around, so your internal link structure carries proportionally more weight.

Anchor text: context, not keyword-stuffing

Anchor text is a context signal, and quality matters — but quality means descriptive, not keyword-crammed. Google’s guidance: “Good anchor text is: descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it’s on and to the page it links to.” Evidence for this claim Google recommends descriptive, concise, relevant anchor text for internal links. Scope: Google anchor-text best practices. Confidence: high · Verified: 2026-07-14 Google Search Central: Anchor text The failure mode to fix is generic anchor text — “click here,” “read more,” “learn more” — which tells search engines nothing.

What you should not do is force exact-match keywords into every internal anchor. Mueller, directly on this: you don’t need to change anchor text to “buy your cheese online here,” and keyword-optimizing internal anchors is “not something where you would see a visible effect in search.” Descriptive variation (“email marketing strategies,” “how to set up email automation”) all pointing at the same page is fine and natural. Bing is a little more keyword-forward than Google in its wording, but the principle — descriptive and contextually relevant — holds for both.

Two narrow edge cases worth knowing, so you don’t over-generalize them. First, if an anchor has no visible text at all, Google falls back to reading the link’s title attribute — but that’s a fallback for an otherwise-empty anchor, not a substitute for writing real anchor text on a normal text link. Second, when the clickable content is an image rather than text, Google treats the image’s alt attribute as the anchor text — so a linked image needs a real, destination-describing alt value, the same way a text link needs descriptive words, not a decorative or empty one.

How many internal links per page?

There is no documented maximum from Google. The old “100 links per page” limit is a myth — it traces back to a long-retired technical recommendation, not a ranking rule. Google’s current line: “There’s no magical ideal number of links a given page should contain. However, if you think it’s too much, then it probably is.”

But “more is always better” is also wrong, and for a subtle reason: linking everything to everything destroys the hierarchy signal. Mueller: “if all pages are linked to all other pages on the website, where you essentially have like a complete internal linking across every single page, then there’s no real structure there.” A fully connected graph tells Google nothing about which pages matter most. Selective linking is what creates a readable importance hierarchy. For a typical article, 3–5 contextual links alongside your normal navigation is a sensible starting point.

Click depth is your most actionable metric

Click depth — how many clicks from the homepage a page sits — is Google’s rough proxy for importance. Mueller: “if it’s one click from the homepage… then that tells us that these stores are probably pretty relevant.” And on the flip side, “a flatter site structure is easier for us to crawl. If we have to go through a lot of pages to actually find the content, then that’s going to be a bit harder.”

Pages more than 3–4 clicks deep tend to get crawled less frequently and receive less PageRank. On large sites, reducing click depth — surfacing buried pages through hub pages, related-content modules, and navigation — is often the highest-ROI technical change you can make.

Don’t nofollow your own internal links

This is the one to get tattooed. PageRank sculpting — adding nofollow to internal links to funnel equity toward “important” pages — has been dead since 2009. Before then, nofollowing a link redistributed its share to the page’s other links. Google changed that: now the PageRank assigned to a nofollowed link evaporates. It doesn’t move anywhere — it’s just gone. So nofollowing internal links doesn’t redirect authority; it destroys it.

Illyes has been blunt that you shouldn’t nofollow your own internal links — it’s “probably never the answer, especially on your own site.” And note the 2019 change: nofollow is now a hint, not a directive, so it doesn’t even reliably stop crawling. If you genuinely need to keep bots out of a URL space (faceted-nav parameter explosions, internal search results), the right tool is robots.txt disallow, not nofollow on links. (For the full link-attribute story — nofollow, sponsored, ugc — see the dedicated nofollow write-up.)

One more myth while we’re here: structured data is not a substitute for internal links. Mueller: “Even if in the structured data you also provide URLs, we don’t use those URLs in the same way as we would use normal internal links on a page.” You still need real HTML links.

And nofollow doesn’t wall the destination off, either. If the same URL is linked elsewhere on your site without nofollow, listed in your sitemap, or already known to Google from a prior crawl, it can still be discovered and crawled through that other path. Nofollow is a qualification on one link, not a destination-wide crawl or index control — which is exactly why it’s the wrong tool for keeping a URL space out of the index in the first place.

One more separation worth keeping straight before you audit: a crawlable internal link only gets a URL found, and possibly crawled — it can’t override what happens to that URL afterward. If the destination redirects, returns an error, carries a noindex tag, or resolves to a different canonical URL, no amount of internal linking makes it independently indexable. Debug those signals — response code, robots access, canonical target, noindex state — on the destination itself, separately from whether the link pointing to it is well-formed.

A practical internal-link audit, in priority order

1. Orphan pages — the #1 fix. Pages with zero internal links can’t be discovered through your own link graph and receive zero internal PageRank. Find them, link to them from relevant pages.
2. Broken internal links (4XX). Links pointing at dead URLs waste the signal and the crawl. Fix or repoint them.
3. Click depth. Find pages buried 4+ clicks deep and pull the important ones closer to the homepage.
4. Link-equity mapping. Make sure your highest-value pages are receiving the most (and most relevant) internal links — and that you’re not flattening the hierarchy by linking everything to everything.

Tools: Google Search Console (Links report), Ahrefs Site Audit, and Screaming Frog all surface orphans, broken links, and depth.

Where to go next

This is the hub for internal linking. Internal links are one piece of the broader on-page SEO picture — the signals you control on the page itself. From here, the natural neighbors are header tags (the H1–H6 structure that gives a page its outline) and image SEO (alt text, which doubles as the anchor text for image links). Those topics live in the same on-page pillar and will auto-link once published.

Internal links also sit on the boundary with technical SEO: they’re the front half of crawl discovery (the back half being sitemaps and push protocols), and the structure they create is what site architecture and crawl depth are really about. If your internal-link problem is really a crawlability problem, start there.

AI summary

A condensed take on the Advanced version:

• Internal links = links between pages on the same site. They do two separate jobs: (1) discovery — they’re the primary way Googlebot finds URLs; (2) signal-passing — PageRank flows along them and anchor text supplies topical context.
• Crawlable means a real <a href>. onclick handlers and framework routerLink attributes without an href aren’t crawlable — a common way JS sites orphan their own pages.
• PageRank is alive. The public toolbar died in 2016; the internal algorithm still runs (Illyes). More internal links to a page = higher inferred importance (Mueller). Mueller calls internal linking “super critical for SEO.”
• Anchor text = context, not keyword-stuffing. Descriptive beats generic (“click here”). Forcing exact-match keywords has “no visible effect in search.”
• No magic link count. The 100-link limit is a myth. But linking everything to everything destroys the hierarchy signal — link selectively.
• Click depth matters. Pages 4+ clicks from the homepage get crawled and weighted less; reducing depth is often the highest-ROI fix on large sites.
• Never nofollow internal links to sculpt PageRank — dead since 2009; the equity evaporates. Use robots.txt to control crawling instead. Structured-data URLs are not a substitute for real internal links.
• Audit order: orphan pages → broken links → click depth → link-equity mapping.
• Local note: internal links appear to matter more for local queries (fewer external signals to go around).

Official documentation

Primary-source documentation from the search engines.

Google

• SEO link best practices — the primary reference: what makes a link crawlable (<a href>), descriptive anchor text, “every page you care about should have a link,” and “no magical ideal number” of links. Start here.
• SEO Starter Guide — links as the main discovery channel and anchor text as context.
• In-Depth Guide to How Google Search Works — the hub-page → new-blog-post URL discovery example.
• Googlebot — links as the primary URL-discovery mechanism.
• Qualify your outbound links to Google — nofollow/sponsored/ugc, and why robots.txt (not nofollow) is the tool for internal crawl control.
• Importance of Link Architecture (2008) — foundational, still cited: internal linking is “a crucial step in site design.”

Bing / Microsoft

• Bing Webmaster Guidelines — orphan-page risk, a logical internal structure, and (more explicitly than Google) keyword-rich descriptive anchor text.
• Making Links Work For You (2009) — prefer absolute internal URLs to avoid diluting link value; quality over quantity.

Quotes from the source

On-the-record statements from Google and Bing. Each link is a deep link that jumps to the quoted passage on the source page.

Google — what makes a link crawlable & good anchor text (SEO link best practices)

• “Google can only crawl your link if it’s an <a> HTML element (also known as anchor element) with an href attribute.” Jump to quote
• “Good anchor text is: descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it’s on and to the page it links to.” Jump to quote
• “Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site.” Jump to quote
• “There’s no magical ideal number of links a given page should contain. However, if you think it’s too much, then it probably is.” Jump to quote

Google — links as the discovery channel

• “The vast majority of the new pages Google finds every day are through links, making links a crucial resource you need to consider.” Jump to quote
• “Googlebot discovers new URLs to crawl primarily from links embedded in previously crawled pages.” Jump to quote

John Mueller, Google — “super critical for SEO”

• “Internal linking is super critical for SEO. I think it’s one of the biggest things that you can do on a website to kind of guide Google and guide visitors to the pages that you think are important.” Jump to quote

John Mueller, Google — anchor text & over-optimization

• “It’s not something where you would see a visible effect in search.” (on forcing keyword-exact internal anchor text) Jump to quote

John Mueller, Google — over-linking destroys structure

• “If all pages are linked to all other pages on the website, where you essentially have like a complete internal linking across every single page, then there’s no real structure there.” Jump to quote

Gary Illyes, Google — links aren’t a top-3 factor (but still matter)

• “I think they are important, but I think people overestimate the importance of links. I don’t agree it’s in the top three. It hasn’t been for some time.” Jump to quote

Martin Splitt, Google — just use HTML links

• “There is an HTML link tag, you put a URL in the href, that’s how you link and I don’t know why people are reinventing the wheel.” Jump to quote

Gary Illyes, Google — don’t nofollow your own internal links (paraphrased)

• Illyes has said sites shouldn’t nofollow their own internal links — that nofollow is “probably never the answer, especially on your own site.” Nofollowing internal links makes PageRank evaporate (post-2009 behavior); use robots.txt disallow for access control instead.

Internal-link audit checklist

Work it roughly top to bottom — the early items are the highest-ROI fixes:

• No orphan pages. Every page you care about is linked from at least one other relevant page on the site.
• No broken internal links. Fix or repoint any internal links hitting 4XX (and clean up redirect chains while you’re there).
• Important pages are shallow. Your priority pages are reachable within ~3 clicks of the homepage; nothing important is buried 4+ clicks deep.
• Links are real <a href> elements — not onclick handlers, routerLink attributes, or non-anchor tags that crawlers can’t follow.
• Anchor text is descriptive — no naked “click here,” “read more,” or “learn more”; the text describes the destination page.
• Anchor text isn’t over-optimized — descriptive variation, not the same exact-match keyword crammed into every link.
• No nofollow on internal links — you’re not trying to sculpt PageRank (dead since 2009); the structure isn’t leaking equity.
• Hierarchy is readable — you’re not linking every page to every other page (which flattens the importance signal).
• Image links have descriptive alt — for an image link, the alt text plays the role of anchor text.
• Highest-value pages get the most internal links — link-equity flow matches your actual priorities (check the GSC Links report / Ahrefs internal-link counts).
• Crawl access controlled with the right tool — low-value URL spaces (faceted params, internal search) handled with robots.txt, not internal nofollow.

The mental models

1. Internal links do two jobs — keep them separate. Discovery (the crawler follows the link to find the page) and signal-passing (PageRank + anchor-text context flow along the link). A page can be discoverable but still weak if only one link points to it. Diagnose which job is failing before you act.

2. Hub-and-spoke / topic clusters. A central hub (pillar) page links out to a set of related spoke (cluster) articles, and each spoke links back to the hub and to its siblings. The SEO value of content clusters is largely internal-link architecture: the hub gathers PageRank from its spokes and distributes it back, concentrating topical authority. This very page is a hub.

3. The pyramid (click-depth) model. Homepage at the top, broad category/hub pages below, then individual pages — with every important page reachable within ~3 clicks. Click depth is Google’s proxy for importance: shallow = important and crawled often; deep = deprioritized.

4. Structure is a signal — so link selectively. Linking everything to everything flattens the graph and tells Google nothing about relative importance. The shape of your internal links is itself information. Selective, hierarchical linking is what makes it readable.

5. The “which control?” decision rule for crawl access. Want a link not to pass equity to an external page? rel="nofollow"/sponsored/ ugc. Want bots to skip an internal URL space entirely? robots.txt disallow — never internal nofollow (it just evaporates PageRank). Want a page out of the index? noindex with crawling allowed. Internal nofollow solves none of these.

Orphaning a page and relying on the sitemap

An XML sitemap can introduce a URL to a crawler, but it does not give the page a place in the internal-link graph. Add a relevant crawlable path from a hub, category, or contextual source if the page matters.

Using nofollow to sculpt internal PageRank

Nofollowing selected internal links does not preserve a neat pool of value for the remaining links. Keep useful navigation followable and remove or redesign links that should not exist instead of trying to sculpt them.

Linking with buttons or click handlers only

A control that changes routes through JavaScript may not expose a usable destination. Use ordinary <a href> links for navigable pages, then enhance their behavior.

Adding links from irrelevant sentences

Keyword overlap is not enough. A link should help the reader continue the task or understand the concept. Sitewide automated insertions can create confusing anchors, self-links, and links that contradict the sentence.

Sending internal links through redirects or errors

Old URLs, redirect chains, and broken destinations waste crawling and frustrate users. Update the source link to the final canonical destination and verify its status after migrations or large publishing changes.

Repeating one exact anchor mechanically

Internal exact-match anchors are not the external-link spam problem people often fear, but repetitive boilerplate is still poor writing. Use concise, descriptive language that fits each source context.

Internal-link audit cheat sheet

DevTools Console: export links on the current page

Run this in the browser DevTools Console. It resolves relative URLs and marks whether each destination shares the current origin.

copy(JSON.stringify([...document.querySelectorAll('a[href]')].map(a => ({
  anchor: a.textContent.trim().replace(/\s+/g, ' '),
  href: a.href,
  internal: new URL(a.href).origin === location.origin,
  rel: a.rel,
  visible: Boolean(a.getClientRects().length)
})), null, 2));

XPath: extract anchors and destinations in a crawler

Use these in a custom-extraction tool that supports XPath.

//a[@href]/normalize-space(string(.))

//a[@href]/@href

Keep the two extractions aligned by element order, or export them together if the crawler supports element-level fields.

Regex: find generic anchor text in HTML

This case-insensitive review pattern captures the destination in group 1 and a common generic anchor in group 2. It is intentionally narrow and is not an HTML parser.

<a\b[^>]*href=["']([^"']+)["'][^>]*>\s*(click here|read more|learn more|this page)\s*</a>

Bookmarklet: outline internal links and show their anchors

Save the one-line code as a bookmark URL, then run it on a page you are auditing.

javascript:(()=>{document.querySelectorAll('a[href]').forEach(a=>{if(new URL(a.href,location.href).origin===location.origin){a.style.outline='2px solid #7c3aed';a.title=`${a.textContent.trim()} → ${a.href}`;}});})();

The bookmarklet changes only the current rendered view. Reload the page to clear the outlines.

Resources worth your time

My related writing

• Internal Links for SEO: An Actionable Guide — the full Ahrefs guide: PageRank flow, contextual link counts, pyramid structure, anchor text, and an audit workflow.
• The Beginner’s Guide to Technical SEO — where internal linking and site architecture fit in the bigger picture.
• The State of Nofollow, UGC, & Sponsored Link Attributes — my study on link attributes, including how much internal nofollow is still (needlessly) out there.

My speaking

• Local Link Building (Pubcon Local 2021) — includes the finding that internal links seem to matter proportionally more for local queries.

Official

• Google’s SEO link best practices — the canonical reference for crawlable links, anchor text, and link counts.

From around the industry

• r/TechSEO — the community for orphan-page, crawl-depth, and internal-link debugging.
• Google: What Crawl Budget Means for Googlebot — Gary Illyes’s canonical post on how internal links drive crawl prioritisation on large sites.
• Google: Evolving “nofollow” — the 2019 announcement that shifted nofollow to a hint and introduced rel="sponsored" and rel="ugc".
• Mueller: Google Uses PageRank for Internal Links (Search Engine Roundtable) — Mueller confirms internal links pass PageRank the same way external links do.
• Mueller: Internal Linking Signals Page-Level Importance (Search Engine Roundtable) — Mueller on how internal link counts inform Google’s sense of which pages matter most.
• Internal Linking Is “Super Critical” for SEO, Says Google (Search Engine Journal) — the 2022 Mueller hangout report with the “super critical” quote.
• Moz: Internal Links — Moz’s reference page on internal link theory, PageRank, and strategy.
• Don’t Try to Reinvent the SEO Wheel, Says Google’s Martin Splitt (Search Engine Land) — Splitt on why sites keep breaking crawlability with non-<a href> link patterns.

Test yourself: Internal Links

Five quick questions on internal linking for SEO. Pick an answer for each, then check.

Internal Link

An internal link is a hyperlink from one page on a website to another page on the same website. Internal links help search engines discover your pages and pass ranking signals (PageRank and anchor-text context) between them.

Related: Internal Linking, PageRank, Anchor Text, Crawl Budget

Internal Link

An internal link is a hyperlink that points from one page on a website to another page on the same website — as opposed to an external (or outbound) link, which points to a different domain. Technically, to be crawlable by Google it has to be a standard HTML <a href> element with a resolvable URL; onclick handlers and framework router attributes without an href don’t count.

Internal links do two jobs at once. First, they’re the primary way crawlers discover pages — Googlebot finds most new URLs by extracting links from pages it already knows. A page with no internal links pointing to it (an “orphan page”) is unlikely to be found or ranked. Second, they pass ranking signals: PageRank flows along internal links, and the anchor text gives search engines topical context about the page being linked to.

Because of that second job, internal linking is one of the most direct levers you have over which of your own pages search engines treat as important. The more (and the better) you link to a page from relevant places on your site, the stronger the signal that it matters. This is why John Mueller has called internal linking “super critical for SEO.”

Related: Internal Linking, PageRank, Anchor Text, Crawl Budget

Changelog