Five mistakes teams make with internal linking

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit internal linking.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

What to watch for

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Internal links spread authority to the pages that need it
• Descriptive anchor text beats "click here" every time
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Orphan pages rarely rank at all. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Where to go from here

What this looks like day to day

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Three things worth confirming about internal linking before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Internal links spread authority to the pages that need it — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.