Discovery: Google follows links to find pages and recommends that every page you care about gets a link from at least one other page on your site. Only links built with an a element and an href attribute are reliably followed. Distribution: the homepage and a few articles usually collect most backlinks, and their internal links pass that value on to the pages they reference. Understanding: anchor text and surrounding context tell Google what the target page covers and where it sits in the site hierarchy.

Organize content by topic: one pillar page per service or subject, linked to more specific pages that link back to it. Keep key pages a few clicks from the homepage, add breadcrumbs and favor links inside body copy, which carry more meaning than links repeated in the menu or footer. Google gives no ideal number of links per page, but notes that too many is probably a problem.

Common mistakes

  • Orphan pages that no internal link reaches: only the sitemap knows they exist.
  • JavaScript-generated links without an href attribute, invisible to crawlers.
  • Links to redirected or 404 URLs left over from a redesign.
  • Generic anchors such as "read more" on every article card.
  • Nofollowed internal links: for your own pages, Google recommends robots.txt instead.

A method for an existing site

Run the site through a crawler to find orphan pages and pages buried too deep. Use the Links report in Search Console to find your most linked-to pages, then add a contextual link from them to your money pages. For every new article, plan one link to the relevant service page and two or three to related posts, and update older posts so they point to the new one. Repeat the crawl after each redesign, because migrations are when most internal links silently break.