What is internal linking? Definition, types and best practices

How does internal linking work?

Internal linking works by creating crawlable paths between your pages that pass context, discovery and authority. Googlebot follows links from the homepage to categories, articles and products, and uses the anchor text to understand what each target is about. A page without any internal links (an orphan page) is hard for Google to find even when it sits in the XML sitemap.

Google only reliably follows a elements with an href attribute. Links built with onclick handlers, span tags or JavaScript routes without href may not be parsed. A crawlable link looks like this:

• Crawlable: <a href=”/glossary/hreflang/”>hreflang guide</a>
• Not reliable: <span onclick=”goTo(‘/glossary/hreflang/’)”>hreflang guide</span>

Types of internal links

Internal links fall into four groups by their position on the page. Contextual links carry the most weight for topical relevance, while navigation links ensure coverage.

Navigation links

Menus, mega menus and footers. They appear on every page, so they define your site’s top-level architecture.

Contextual links

Links inside body text, such as the links in this glossary entry. They connect semantically related pages and build topical authority.

Breadcrumbs

Paths like Home > Shoes > Running shoes. They show hierarchy and often appear in search results.

Related content modules

Blocks such as related products or recommended articles, usually generated by the CMS.

Internal linking best practices

Good internal linking follows Google’s guidance on descriptive anchors and contextual relevance:

• Write descriptive anchor text that tells users what they get; avoid “click here”.
• Place links in context, with surrounding text that explains the target.
• Link every important page from at least one other page.
• Point links to the final URL, not to a redirect or a non-canonical version.
• Keep key pages within a few clicks of the homepage.

Google says there is no ideal number of links per page. Zyppy’s data shows URLs with 0 to 4 internal links averaged about 2 Google clicks, while URLs with 40 to 44 links received roughly 4 times that, with traffic dropping again after about 45 to 50 links. Treat this as a correlation, not a rule.

Internal linking on multilingual sites

On multilingual sites, internal links should stay within one language version, with a language switcher as the only bridge. A German category page that links to Polish product pages mixes languages, wastes crawl budget and sends German users to content they cannot read. Google also recommends linking each page to its other language versions so users can choose, which supports your hreflang setup but does not replace it.

In my projects, the most common issue after a new language launch is hard-coded links in templates: the German version still links to /pl/kontakt/ because someone pasted an absolute URL. A crawl filtered by subdirectory finds these in minutes.

How to audit internal linking

The Search Console Links report lists your most internally linked pages and which pages link to a given URL, but it is a sample capped at 1,000 rows per table. For a full picture, run a crawler such as Screaming Frog, compare inlinks per URL with your priority pages and fix orphans first. Compare the result with backlinks to see which strong pages can pass value to weaker ones.

Read more in my guide to on-page SEO, or order an SEO audit that includes internal link analysis for every language version, as part of international SEO.