Internal Linking

What does internal linking still control?

Discovery and relationship, both of which sit upstream of everything else. A page with no inbound internal link is close to invisible regardless of quality: crawlers reach pages by following links, and a page reachable only from a sitemap is a page nothing has voted for. The anchor text is the other half, because it is the clearest statement you can make about what the target page is.

That upstream position is why internal linking survived the shift to answer engines untouched. Retrieval cannot select a passage from a page that was never crawled, so the classic mechanics still gate the modern outcome.

How should anchor text be written for retrieval?

As a description of the destination, in the words somebody would use for it. “Read more” describes nothing; the term name, the question or the page’s subject describes everything. And it should vary between links to the same page, because a page linked forty times with one identical phrase has been described once, forty times over.

The honest admission: how much anchor text matters to an assistant is unmeasured. Retrieval pipelines convert pages to text and select passages, and none of them documents weighting anchors the way Google historically has. What is certain is that anchors still drive the crawling and ranking that retrieval sits on top of, which is enough reason to get them right.

Where do internal links get quietly wasted?

In navigation, and in links that exist to fill a quota. A link repeated in a template on every page says the same thing everywhere and distinguishes nothing; a link inserted mid-sentence because a plan called for three per article usually points somewhere the reader was not going. The links that work are the ones a reader would actually follow.

One structural rule worth keeping: every advertised link must resolve. A live page linking to a route that 404s is a defect in the mechanism this whole entry is about, and it is invisible until somebody crawls the site or a reader clicks. This site enforces that as a test rather than as a convention: every internal link inside a glossary entry is checked against the built routes, and a link to a page that does not exist fails the build rather than shipping. The rule exists because the alternative was measured on this site: nine advertised links in the header and footer pointed at pages nobody had built, and they stayed live for weeks because nothing looked.

Related terms

• Topic ClusterA topic cluster is a group of pages covering one subject: a broad pillar page and the deeper pages that link up to it and across to each other.
• Pillar PageA pillar page is the broad page at the centre of a topic cluster, covering a subject widely and linking out to the deeper pages that cover its parts.
• Crawl BudgetCrawl budget is the amount of crawling an engine will do on a site, set by what the server can take and by how much the engine wants the content.
• XML SitemapAn XML sitemap is a file listing the URLs on a site that you want search engines to know about, optionally with the date each was last modified.