Signs it is time to revisit internal linking

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. A few signals that internal linking is due some attention.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

The signals

• Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
• The answer depends on who you ask
• Internal links spread authority to the pages that need it
• Descriptive anchor text beats "click here" every time

What good looks like

Orphan pages rarely rank at all. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

In practice

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Three things worth confirming about internal linking before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Descriptive anchor text beats "click here" every time — 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.