Internal linking: the lever you fully control
You want more from the pages you already have and cannot get external links quickly.
Short answer
Internal links are the only ranking input you control completely. They determine what gets discovered, how often it gets crawled, and which of your pages an engine treats as important. A page nothing links to is a page you have published and not argued for, and on most sites there are more of them than anyone expects.
What internal links actually do
Three things: they let a crawler find the page, they pass a share of whatever authority the linking page has, and they signal what you consider important. The third is the one people forget, and it is why a page linked only from a sitemap behaves differently from one linked from your homepage.
Navigation links are not the same as body links
A link in a template repeats on every page and is discounted accordingly. A link inside body copy is a specific editorial decision about relevance, and it carries more weight. An audit that counts them together will tell you every page is well linked.
Find the orphans
Crawl your own site and list pages with no inbound internal link from body content. Every one is a page you published and then argued for nowhere. This list is usually longer than expected and it is the cheapest fix available.
Anchor text is a description, not a slot
Write the link text as you would describe the destination to a person. Exact-match anchors repeated across a site look manufactured and read badly. "Read more" and "click here" waste the signal entirely.
Link from strong pages to the ones that need help
Your few pages that already rank have authority to share. Linking from them to a striking-distance page is the closest thing to a free ranking improvement, and it takes minutes. Most sites link the other way, from new pages to the established ones.
Depth from the homepage
A page many clicks from the homepage gets crawled less and treated as less important. That is not about URL structure, it is about the click path. Flattening the path to your important pages is usually a navigation change rather than a URL change.
Do it after you know what matters
Internal linking is most valuable once you know which pages produce your traffic, because then you know which pages have authority to lend and which need it. Doing it blind produces a well-connected site with no direction.
Questions
- How many internal links should a page have?
- As many as genuinely help the reader, which for a substantial page is usually a handful in the body. There is no target number worth optimising toward and pages stuffed with links read badly.
- Do nofollow internal links help sculpt authority?
- No. That approach stopped working many years ago and adds complexity for nothing. Link where it helps the reader and leave the attributes alone.
- Should every page link to every other page?
- No. That is a footer link farm, it dilutes the signal, and it removes any information about what you consider related. Link deliberately.
Measured, not asserted
The concentration makes this lever obvious in hindsight: on ihatepdf.cv, five pages of 160 produced 75.4% of all clicks on the way to 100,542 users. Those five were the only pages with real authority to lend, and linking from them to the striking-distance pages was worth more than any amount of outreach at DR 22.
Free tool for this: Internal Link Graph. No account, nothing uploaded.
Where this goes deeper
Every number on this page comes from one complete dataset: one product taken from zero to 100K+ users on search alone, with nothing spent on advertising. The full argument is Chapter 6 and Chapter 25 of the book. Five chapters are free to read.