Internal linking: the questions we get asked most

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. The questions about internal linking that come up most often on our calls.

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Do we need to care about this?

Internal links spread authority to the pages that need it. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one.

How do we know it is working?

Orphan pages rarely rank at all. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

In practice

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Three things worth confirming about internal linking before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Orphan pages rarely rank at all — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.