Glossar

Glossar zur internen Verlinkung

Eighteen terms that come up whenever internal links are discussed — defined plainly, with the practical consequence rather than just the definition. Where a term has a full guide behind it, the entry carries a Link to that guide. Grouped by subject rather than alphabetically, so the order reads the same in every language.

The basics

Internal link: A link from one page to another on the same domain. The only ranking factor you fully control, and the mechanism by which search engines discover, weigh and categorise everything you publish.See: The complete guide
External link: A link pointing to a different domain. Not the enemy — citing sources is normal and useful. The distinction matters only because internal and external links serve different purposes and follow different rules.
Contextual link: A link inside body text, placed because that passage genuinely leads somewhere. Weighed far more heavily than navigation links, because it reflects an editorial decision about one specific page rather than a template applied to all of them.
Deep link: A link to a page below the top level of a site, rather than to the homepage or a main category. Most internal links should be deep links; a site whose links nearly all point at the homepage distributes nothing.
Ankertext: The visible, clickable words of a link. It tells a reader what they will get and tells a search engine what the target page is about. On internal links you write every one yourself, which makes it the cheapest signal on most sites to improve.See: Choosing anchor text

How value moves

Link equity (link juice): The informal name for the ranking value a link passes on. Internally it means: whatever standing your domain has gets distributed along the links between your pages. Pages receiving many relevant internal links inherit more of it.
PageRank: The original algorithm for weighting pages by the links pointing at them. The public score is long gone, but the underlying idea — that links transfer standing, and a link from an important page counts for more — still describes how internal linking works.
Nofollow: An attribute telling search engines not to pass value through a link. Appropriate for paid or untrusted external links. Using it on internal links to “sculpt” the flow has not worked since 2009 — it removes signal rather than redirecting it.
Click depth: How many clicks from the homepage a page sits at. Lower is better: shallow pages are crawled more often and inherit more authority. A page four clicks deep is treated as less important than one at two, regardless of how good it is.
Crawl budget: The finite attention a search engine gives your site per visit. Rarely a constraint below a few thousand pages. Where it matters, internal links decide how that attention is spent — well-linked pages get revisited, orphans do not.

Structure

Topic cluster: A pillar page covering a broad subject, surrounded by detailed pages on its sub-topics, all linked in both directions. The modern, less rigid form of siloing — and the structure this glossary and its guides are built as.
Silo: A structure where pages on one topic link densely among themselves and sparsely to other topics. Creates clear thematic boundaries. Applied too strictly it becomes artificial — genuinely related pages should link regardless of which silo they were assigned to.
Cornerstone content: The pages you most want to rank — usually comprehensive guides rather than news items. The practical rule: cornerstone pages should receive many internal links and send comparatively few, so authority collects there.
Breadcrumb: A trail of links showing where a page sits in the hierarchy — Home › Guides › Anchor text. Useful for orientation, and it creates a reliable internal link to every ancestor page. Structural rather than editorial, so it complements contextual links rather than replacing them.

What goes wrong, and the plumbing

Orphan page: A page no other page on the site links to. It loads fine and may sit in the sitemap, but nothing following links can reach it. Almost every site older than a year has some, usually created by tidying rather than by neglect.See: Finding orphan pages
Redirect chain: A URL that redirects to a URL that redirects again. Each hop costs a little. When you change a slug, update the internal links pointing at it rather than relying on the redirect alone.
Canonical tag: A signal declaring which URL is the authoritative version when the same content is reachable at several addresses. Relevant to internal linking because links pointing at a non-canonical variant waste part of their effect — always link the canonical URL.
XML sitemap: A file listing the URLs you want indexed. It tells a crawler a page exists; internal links tell it the page matters. Being in the sitemap is not a substitute for being linked.