Internal linking: helping people and Google move through your site

An internal link is a link from one page on your site to another page on the same site. Internal links do three jobs at once. They let visitors move to related content. They let Google discover pages, because Googlebot finds most URLs by following links. And they tell Google something about each page: what it is about, through the words used to link to it, and how important it is, through how often and how prominently it is linked.

What makes a link crawlable

Google's link best practices are specific: Google can reliably follow links that are <a> elements with an href attribute containing a real URL.

<!-- Google can follow these -->
<a href="/guides/seo-basics">SEO basics</a>
<a href="https://example.com/pricing">Pricing</a>

<!-- Google may not follow these -->
<span onclick="goTo('/pricing')">Pricing</span>
<a routerlink="/pricing">Pricing</a>
<button onclick="location.href='/pricing'">Pricing</button>

Links that only work when JavaScript runs a click handler are a common problem in modern sites. A visitor can click them, but Googlebot does not click things. If a whole navigation menu is built that way, Google may never find the pages it leads to. The fix is usually simple: render a normal <a href> and let the JavaScript framework enhance it.

Anchor text

Anchor text is the clickable text of a link. Google uses it to understand the page being linked to, and readers use it to decide whether to follow it. Good anchor text describes the destination.

You do not need identical anchor text every time you link to a page. Natural variations that still describe the destination are fine and read better.

Where links come from on a page

Not all internal links are equal in what they communicate. A link inside a relevant paragraph sits next to text that gives it context, so it tells readers and Google a lot. Navigation menus, breadcrumbs and footers appear on many pages, so they signal site-wide importance and structure. A footer that links to hundreds of pages from every page communicates very little about any of them.

Breadcrumbs deserve a special mention. A breadcrumb trail such as Home › Running › Trail shoes shows the page's place in the site hierarchy and gives every page a link back to its parents. Google may show breadcrumbs in results instead of the URL, especially when you add BreadcrumbList structured data.

Orphan pages and depth

An orphan page is a page with no internal links pointing to it. It might be listed in your sitemap, so Google can still discover it, but it receives no internal context and appears unimportant. Visitors cannot reach it by browsing at all.

Depth matters too. A page that takes six clicks to reach from the home page tends to be crawled less often and is treated as less central than one that is two clicks away. You do not need every page within two clicks, but your most important pages should be easy to reach.

To find gaps, crawl your site with an SEO crawler and look at the number of internal links pointing to each important page and its click depth. Then add links where they genuinely help readers: from related articles, from category pages, from the main navigation if the page is central to the business.

Broken internal links

Links to URLs that return 404 waste visitors' time and send Googlebot to dead ends. When a page moves, update the links that point to it so they go straight to the new URL, and redirect the old URL. Fixing the link itself is better than relying on the redirect forever, because every redirect adds a step for both browsers and crawlers.