Deep link
A deep 链接 points to a page below the top level of a site — a specific article, product or guide — rather than to the homepage or a main category.
Most 内部链接 should be deep links. A site whose links nearly all point at the homepage distributes nothing: the standing piles up on the one page that needs it least.
Two meanings, one word
Worth naming the ambiguity. In mobile app development, a “deep link” is a URL that opens a specific screen inside an installed app. In web SEO — the sense used here — it simply means a link to an interior page rather than the front door.
The two have nothing to do with each other beyond the shared metaphor of reaching past the entrance.
Why homepage links waste effort
The homepage is already the best-linked page on almost every site — the logo alone points at it from every template. Adding more does not change its position and does nothing for the pages that could actually rank.
Interior pages are where the specific search terms live. A category page can compete for a broad term; an individual guide competes for the long tail. Both need inbound internal links to do it, and both usually have far too few. Sending a reader to the homepage also costs them a step: they arrived with a question and now have to find the answer themselves.
How to check your own ratio
Open Search Console, go to Links and read the internal links report. It ranks every URL by how many internal links point at it. If the homepage sits at the top by a wide margin and the second entry is a legal page, the site is linking to itself rather than to its content.
Read that list from the bottom too: the pages with one or two inbound links are the ones the site is quietly telling a search engine not to bother with. Anything with zero is an orphan page, and those never show up in that report at all.
Deep links from outside
The same distinction applies to backlinks, and there it is largely out of your hands. Most people who link to a site link to its homepage, because that is the address they know. A backlink profile consisting almost entirely of homepage links is common and is usually described as shallow.
You cannot dictate where strangers link. What you can do is make interior pages worth linking to and easy to cite — a specific guide, a data page, a tool. And where a mention does land on the homepage, internal links are what carry that value onward. That is the practical reason deep internal linking matters even to sites whose external links are all shallow.
Where the term causes confusion
Two adjacent terms get mixed up with it constantly.
Deep linking in apps — a URL that opens a particular screen in an installed application, with its own standards and tooling. Nothing to do with the SEO sense beyond the metaphor.
Hotlinking — embedding an asset such as an image directly from another server. Sometimes loosely called deep linking in older writing, particularly in legal contexts where linking past a homepage was once litigated.
Within SEO the term is stable and simply means: not the homepage, not a top-level category.
Making deep pages worth linking to
A deep link only helps if the destination answers something. Three things make an interior page a natural target:
- It has a single subject. A page covering one question can be linked from any sentence raising that question. A page covering six can be linked from none of them cleanly.
- Its URL is stable. Every slug change turns existing links into redirects, and some of them break entirely.
- It is findable from more than one direction. A page reachable only through a single menu path is one navigation cleanup away from being an orphan.
English 
Deutsch 
Español 
简体中文 
हिन्दी 
Français 
العربية 
Русский 
Português