Definition

Internal linking is the practice of placing hyperlinks from one page on a site to another page on the same site, typically within body content, navigation, or footer areas.

Google's SEO Starter Guide notes that internal links help users navigate a site and help search engines understand which pages are most important by surfacing them through site hierarchy. Pages with no internal links — "orphan pages" — are harder for Google to discover. The anchor text used on an internal link also acts as a topical signal about the destination page.

Examples

• Hub-and-spoke pattern

  A finance blog publishes a guide to first-home buyer schemes and links from it to ten supporting articles on stamp duty, deposits, and grants. Google follows those links to discover and contextualise the supporting pages.

Sources

• Google Search Central — SEO Starter Guide (links)
• Google Search Central — Make your links crawlable

Related terms

• Anchor Text
  The visible, clickable text inside a hyperlink. Search engines use it as a hint about the topic of the page being linked to.
• Backlink
  A hyperlink on one website that points at another. Search engines treat backlinks as one signal of how the wider web vouches for a page.
• Crawl Budget
  The number of URLs a search engine crawler will fetch and the rate at which it fetches them on a given site.

Where QueryCatch uses this

• SEO Audit
• Page Optimisation