Internal linking for small teams

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. Most advice about internal linking assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

What to keep

Internal links spread authority to the pages that need it. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped.

The practical version

Orphan pages rarely rank at all. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

How to tell if yours is fine

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
• 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

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.