Internal linking: what it is, why it works, and how to get it right

Backlinks get the attention. But for the pages you already own, the links between them do most of the work — and they are the only ranking factor you fully control. This guide covers what internal links do, how search engines read them, and the handful of decisions that separate a site that links well from one that does not.

An internal ligação points from one page on your domain to another page on the same domain. That is the whole definition. A link in your navigation is an internal link; so is a link inside a paragraph, in a footer, or in a related-posts box.

The distinction that matters is not where the link sits but whether a human put it there on purpose. Navigation links are structural — every page gets them, so they say very little about any individual page. A link inside a sentence is editorial: someone decided that this passage was a good reason to send a reader to that page. Search engines weigh the second kind far more heavily, and so do readers.

Everything in this guide is about the editorial kind.

A crawler arrives at your homepage and follows links. That is how it discovers what exists. If no link points to a page, the crawler has no route to it — the page may sit in your sitemap and still be treated as an afterthought.

Internal links do three things at once:

• They create discovery paths. How many clicks from the homepage a page sits at — its click depth — correlates with how often it gets crawled. A page four clicks deep gets visited far less than one at two.
• They pass authority. Whatever standing your domain has, links distribute it. A page that receives many internal links from relevant pages inherits more of it than one that receives none.
• They declare topic. The words in the link, and the sentence around it, tell a search engine what the target page is about. Twenty pages linking to one page with related wording is a strong, consistent signal.

The first two are mechanical. The third is where craft comes in.

Anchor text is the visible, clickable words of a link. Unlike backlinks, where you take what you are given, every internal anchor on your site is yours to choose. Most sites waste that.

Three rules cover almost everything:

• Describe the destination, not the action. “Read more” and “click here” tell a search engine nothing and tell a reader almost as little. “How to reduce click depth” tells both exactly what they will get.
• Vary the wording. If forty pages link to the same target with the identical phrase, that reads as a pattern rather than as forty independent editorial decisions. Natural variation — sometimes the exact term, sometimes a paraphrase, sometimes a longer phrase around it — is both more honest and more effective.
• Keep it inside a real sentence. A link that interrupts a sentence you would have written anyway carries context. A link bolted onto the end of a paragraph carries none.

One practical note on length: an anchor of two to five words tends to work best. Single words are often too ambiguous, and a whole sentence dilutes the signal across too many terms. There is more to say here than fits in one section — the six types of anchor, when each is right, and what over-optimisation actually means are covered in the guide to choosing anchor text.