When internal linking is worth the effort

The version of this that works is simpler than the version most people imagine. Internal linking is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

When it is worth it

Internal links spread authority to the pages that need it. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions.

How to decide

Orphan pages rarely rank at all. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

What this looks like day to day

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
• 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

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.