Internal linking – Glossary

Connecting pages on your site with clear, descriptive anchor text that guides users, builds topic hubs, and keeps crawl paths efficient for search engines.

Why it matters

• Help people discover related content.
• Reduce bounce by offering useful next steps.
• Help search engines understand your site’s structure and topical relationships.
• Improve indexation.
• Distribute authority.
• Surface the pages that matter most.

Best practices

• Use descriptive anchor text. Write the link like a concise promise of what the target page delivers.
• Build topic hubs. Group related pages and link them both ways to establish a clear content cluster.
• Prioritize important pages. Link to cornerstone content from navigation, hubs, and relevant articles.
• Keep paths shallow. Minimize clicks from key entry points to your most valuable pages.
• Maintain links. Audit regularly, fix or redirect broken links, and update outdated anchors.

Patterns that work

• Hub and spoke. A pillar page that links to detailed articles, each linking back to the pillar.
• Related content blocks. Inline or end-of-page sections that offer next steps on the same topic.
• Breadcrumbs. Hierarchical links that clarify context and reduce friction.
• Contextual links. Natural, in-body links where they add value, not just in sidebars.

Avoid

• Vague anchors like “click here” or “learn more.”
• Overlinking the same phrase in a paragraph.
• Linking for the sake of linking. Each link should help the reader or clarify structure.
• Deep pages with no inbound links. Orphaned content is hard to discover and index.

Measure impact

• Monitor crawl coverage and indexation for linked pages.
• Track time on site, pages per session, and exit rates on hub pages.
• Review internal link counts to key pages, ensure they are gaining relevant links over time.

Related articles

• Ever clicked a link and hit a 404 page?