Aprender
Internal Linking Strategy: Anchor Text, Depth and Distribution
Internal links are the one ranking input you fully control. Most sites treat them as navigation and leave the distribution to whatever the template happens to produce.
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What internal links actually do
They do three separate jobs, and conflating them is why most internal linking advice is vague. They let crawlers discover pages. They pass authority between pages. And their anchor text tells Google what the destination is about.
The third is the one people underuse. An anchor reading "click here" passes authority and describes nothing; the same link reading "internal linking strategy" passes the same authority and also says what the reader will find.
| Job | What it affects | What controls it |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery | Whether a page is found at all | Any crawlable link |
| Authority | How much weight a page carries | Number and source of links |
| Context | What Google thinks the page is about | Anchor text and surrounding copy |
Internal versus external links
External links point to other domains and are largely outside your control; internal links point within your own site and are entirely within it. That asymmetry is why internal linking is undervalued — it is the only part of the link graph you can edit directly.
Linking out to good sources is not a cost. The idea that outbound links leak value has no basis in how Google describes ranking, and citing evidence is a quality signal in its own right.
Writing anchor text
Contextual links inside body copy carry more weight than links in a global footer, because a footer link appears on every page and says nothing about relevance. That is not a reason to remove footer navigation — it is a reason not to count it as your internal linking strategy.
- Describe the destination, not the action. "Redirect chains" beats "read more".
- Vary the phrasing across links to the same page; identical exact-match anchors everywhere reads as manipulation.
- Keep it short enough to scan and specific enough to be unambiguous.
- Put links inside sentences where they are relevant, not in a block at the end.
- Never link two different destinations with the same anchor on one page.
Finding the pages your site is starving
The common finding is a long tail of pages linked once from a paginated archive and nowhere else. Those are technically reachable and practically invisible. See orphan pages for the zero-link case and crawl budget for why depth matters on large sites.
- 1Crawl the site and export every internal link with its source and destination.
- 2Count inbound internal links per URL, and sort ascending. The bottom of that list is where the problem is.
- 3Cross-reference against your sitemap to find pages with zero inbound links — orphans.
- 4Measure click depth from the home page; anything beyond three or four clicks is hard to discover.
- 5Compare the distribution against business value: an important page with two internal links is a fixable mistake.
A structure that scales
Automated "related posts" widgets are worth auditing rather than trusting. Tag-based similarity routinely links a page to five near-duplicates of itself, which concentrates authority in a cluster nobody searches for.
- Hub pages that link to every page in a topic, and are linked back from each of them.
- Contextual links between related pages, added when the content is written rather than in a later pass.
- Breadcrumbs, which give every page a consistent path back up.
- A related-content block that is curated rather than generated by tag similarity.
- No page more than three or four clicks from the home page.
How DomainLens contributes
DomainLens reports the internal links a page carries and flags those that do not resolve, so a broken link in a template shows up before it costs you discovery. For the anchor-level rules see crawlable links and indexability , and for links that lead nowhere see broken internal links .
- How many internal links should a page have?
- There is no target. Link where it genuinely helps the reader. The useful question is the reverse one: which important pages have too few links pointing at them?
- Do footer links count?
- They count for discovery but carry little contextual weight, because a link repeated site-wide says nothing about the relevance of any particular page.
- Should I use exact-match anchor text?
- Sometimes, and never everywhere. Natural variation reads normally; the same exact phrase on every link to one page reads as manipulation.
- Do outbound links hurt my rankings?
- No. Linking to credible sources is normal and useful. The idea that it drains value from your page is not supported by anything Google has said.