The short version
- Contextual links inside content carry more weight than the same link repeated in navigation.
- Anchor text is a description of the destination. “Click here” describes nothing.
- Click depth matters: pages more than three or four clicks from the homepage get crawled less.
- Orphan pages — in your sitemap but linked from nowhere — are the most common quiet waste.
- Link from strong pages to the ones that need help, not the reverse.
Why internal links do more than people expect
An internal link does four separate jobs, and most people only think about the first.
- Navigation. It helps a human get somewhere. Obvious.
- Discovery. It is how a crawler finds pages. A page nothing links to is a page Google may never see, sitemap or not.
- Authority distribution. Links pass signal between pages. Your homepage usually has the most external authority; internal links are how that reaches everything else.
- Meaning. The anchor text and surrounding sentence tell Google what the destination is about. This is the job people neglect most, and it is the one with the clearest effect.
The reason this matters commercially: it is entirely within your control. You cannot make anyone link to you. You can rewrite your own internal links this afternoon.
Contextual vs boilerplate links
A contextual link sits inside body copy, surrounded by relevant text, placed because it genuinely helps at that point. A boilerplate link appears in navigation, footer or sidebar on every page.
Both are useful. They are not equivalent.
| Contextual | Boilerplate | |
|---|---|---|
| Where | Inside body copy | Nav, footer, sidebar |
| Anchor text | Varies, descriptive | Identical everywhere |
| Surrounding text | Relevant, adds meaning | Other links |
| Weight | Higher | Lower — discounted as furniture |
| Best for | Telling Google what a page is about | Making pages reachable |
The practical consequence: adding a page to your footer makes it reachable but says little about it. One well-placed sentence in a relevant article, linking with descriptive anchor text, communicates far more.
This is why the single highest-value internal link on most content sites is the byline link at the end of an article — the author’s name, as anchor text, pointing at their profile page. Thirty articles with that link is thirty contextual statements about who wrote the content. Thirty articles with only “About” in the nav is thirty pieces of furniture.
Anchor text: what it actually communicates
Anchor text is a short description of the destination, written by you, that Google reads as evidence about that page. Treat it as a promise about what the reader will find.
Worst to best:
- “Click here”, “read more”, “this page” — describe nothing, and are poor for screen-reader users too.
- A bare URL — describes nothing and reads badly.
- The page title verbatim, every time — better, but repetitive and unnatural at volume.
- A descriptive phrase that varies naturally — this is the target.
What natural variation looks like, all pointing at one guide:
...our full guide to canonical tags explains the rest.
...this is what a self-referencing canonical is for.
...if you have filters generating URL variants, start here.Three anchors, three phrasings, one destination. Google gets a richer picture of the page than it would from the same exact-match phrase three times — and the sentences read like something a person wrote.
The over-optimisation line
- Fine: descriptive anchors that vary, placed where they help the reader.
- Risky: the identical commercial phrase, dozens of times, in sentences that exist only to hold the link.
- The test: would this sentence survive if you removed the link? If not, the link is the point and it reads that way.
Free tool · Check the page first
See the links and structure a crawler finds
The page checker reports the heading structure, canonical and indexability of any URL — the context you need before deciding where a page should sit in your internal link graph.
Click depth and crawl budget
Click depth is the minimum number of clicks from your homepage to a page. It correlates with how important Google treats that page and how often it gets recrawled.
Rough guidance:
- Depth 0–1 — homepage and anything linked from it. Crawled most often.
- Depth 2–3 — healthy for most content. Where the bulk of your pages should sit.
- Depth 4–5 — noticeably slower crawling. Worth investigating.
- Depth 6+ — often effectively ignored. Usually a symptom of paginated archives with no other route in.
The classic cause of excessive depth is relying on pagination. If your blog shows ten posts per page and your only route to post 200 is clicking “next” twenty times, that post is depth 20. Category pages, tag pages, related-post blocks and curated hub pages all fix this by creating shortcuts.
Crawl budget is genuinely not a concern for most sites — if you have a few hundred pages, Google can handle it. It starts to matter in the tens of thousands, or when a faceted navigation generates near-infinite URL combinations. Depth, though, matters at any size, because it is a signal about importance as well as reachability.
Finding orphan pages
An orphan page is one that no internal link points to. It may be in your sitemap, it may even be indexed, but nothing on your site says it exists.
Orphans happen constantly and quietly: a landing page built for a campaign that ended, a service page removed from the nav during a redesign, a post published before its category existed, pages migrated without their inbound links.
How to find them without expensive tooling:
- Crawl your site with any crawler that lists internal links, and export the URL list.
- Export your sitemap URLs.
- Diff them. URLs in the sitemap but not in the crawl are orphans — the crawler could only reach what is linked.
- Cross-check Search Console. Pages getting impressions that your crawl never reached are orphans earning traffic despite you.
- Check your analytics for landing pages that receive sessions but appear in no crawl path.
Then either link them properly from somewhere relevant, or decide they should not exist and redirect them. An orphan that deserves to rank is pure waste; one that does not deserve to exist is clutter.
Which way to point the links
The mistake I see most often is linking outward from a page that needs help, rather than inward to it.
The useful mental model: authority flows along links. Your strongest pages — the ones with external links, the ones ranking well — have signal to distribute. A page nobody links to has none to give.
So:
- Find your strongest pages. In Search Console, the pages with the most impressions and clicks.
- Find the pages you want to rank that currently do not.
- Link from the first group to the second, where it is genuinely relevant.
That last clause is not a disclaimer. A link from an unrelated page is noise, and Google is reasonably good at telling the difference between a link that helps a reader and one inserted to move signal. If you cannot write a sentence where the link belongs, it does not belong.
Hubs, clusters and the honest version
The “topic cluster” model — a pillar page linking to related sub-pages, each linking back — is genuinely useful, and it is also routinely oversold as a mechanical trick.
What actually helps:
- A real hub page that is worth reading on its own, not a link farm with an intro paragraph.
- Links both ways — hub to spokes, spokes back to hub.
- Links between spokes where they genuinely relate. This is the part people skip, and it is what makes it a cluster rather than a star.
- Descriptive, varied anchors throughout.
What does not help: building the structure around keywords you want rather than topics you cover, or creating thin spoke pages to fill out a diagram. The structure works because it reflects real coverage of a subject. Imposed on content that does not have that depth, it is just a lot of internal links.
A one-hour audit
In order
- Orphans. Diff your crawl against your sitemap. Link or remove.
- Depth. List anything at depth 4 or more. Add a shortcut from a relevant hub.
- Anchors. Search your site for “click here” and “read more”. Rewrite each one to describe its destination.
- Byline links. If you publish articles, make sure every one links to the author’s profile with their name as anchor text.
- Direction. Take your five strongest pages and add one relevant contextual link from each to a page that needs help.
- Broken links. Fix internal 404s and update any link pointing at a redirect — make it point at the destination directly.
None of this needs a budget or anyone’s permission. It is the most reliably under-done work in on-page SEO, largely because it is unglamorous and there is nothing to buy.
FAQ
How many internal links should a page have?
There is no correct number, and the old “100 links per page” guidance is long obsolete. The useful test is whether each link helps a reader at the point it appears. A long guide might legitimately carry twenty; a short landing page might want two, so the conversion path stays clear. Judge by usefulness rather than counting.
Does anchor text still matter for internal links?
Yes, and arguably more than for external links, because you control it completely. Anchor text is a description of the destination that Google reads as evidence about that page. The goal is descriptive phrases that vary naturally across links to the same destination — not the identical exact-match keyword repeated dozens of times.
What is an orphan page and does it matter?
An orphan page has no internal links pointing to it. It matters because internal links are how Google discovers pages and how authority reaches them — a page in your sitemap but linked from nowhere is telling Google that nothing on your own site considers it important. Either link it properly from somewhere relevant, or redirect it if it should not exist.
Should I use nofollow on internal links?
Almost never. nofollow on internal links does not sculpt authority the way it did before 2009 — the signal is discarded rather than redistributed, so you lose it. The legitimate uses are narrow: links to genuinely low-value URLs like a login or an empty cart, and even then noindex on the destination or blocking it in robots.txt is usually the better instrument.
How deep is too deep for a page?
As a rule of thumb, anything beyond three or four clicks from the homepage starts getting crawled noticeably less often and treated as less important. The usual culprit is pagination — if the only route to an old post is clicking “next” fifteen times, that post is effectively buried. Category pages, hub pages and related-post blocks are the fix.
Thejas Acharya
Digital strategy consultant behind Digital with Thejas, based in Mangaluru, working with founders and marketing teams across India and the US. I build websites, landing pages, Meta Ads campaigns and AI automation that are judged on one thing: whether they generate leads. The free tools on this site are the checks I run on client work, opened up.