Internal linking: a practical guide

The version of this that works is simpler than the version most people imagine. This guide covers what internal linking actually involves, where it usually goes wrong, and how to tell whether yours is in reasonable shape.

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Nothing below assumes a large team or a large budget — most of it is a decision somebody has to make and then write down.

Why it matters

Internal links spread authority to the pages that need it. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

For most businesses the question is not whether this matters but how much of it is worth doing right now. That depends on what you are trying to achieve in the next few months, not on best practice in the abstract. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets.

Where to start

Descriptive anchor text beats "click here" every time. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. The version that works in practice is usually less elaborate than the version described in the guides.

Orphan pages rarely rank at all. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

A working checklist

If you want a quick read on where you stand, work through this. Anything you cannot answer confidently is where to start.

• Internal links spread authority to the pages that need it
• Descriptive anchor text beats "click here" every time
• Orphan pages rarely rank at all
• Someone is named as the owner, not just assumed to be
• There is a date in the calendar to review it again
• The decision and the reasoning behind it are written down somewhere findable
• You could explain the current setup to a new hire in five minutes

Warning signs

The most common failure is not doing this badly. It is doing it once, during a launch, and never revisiting it. Circumstances move, the setup does not, and the gap widens quietly until something breaks or somebody notices the numbers.

• It was configured during a launch and has not been touched since
• Different people in the business believe different things are true about it
• There is no way to tell whether the last change helped or hurt
• The only person who understands it has left, or is about to

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge.

How we approach it

On our projects this gets handled during the build rather than added afterwards, because retrofitting it costs several times more than including it. We write down what was decided and why, so the next person to touch it is not guessing.

If you are working with someone else, the questions worth asking are simple: who owns this, how will we know it is working, and what happens when it needs to change?

What to do next

Pick the single item from the checklist above that would cause the most trouble if it turned out to be wrong. Fix that one, confirm it worked, then move on. None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.