SEO glossary
Internal linking
Internal linking is the practice of linking between pages on your own site, which is how crawlers discover them and how ranking signal moves around.
It does two jobs at once. Discovery: a page nothing links to may never be crawled, no matter what your sitemap says. And distribution: links pass signal, so the pages you link to most from your strongest pages are the ones you are telling Google matter.
The failure to hunt for first is the orphan — a page with no internal links pointing at it. They appear constantly on real sites, usually after a redesign or a nav change, and they are invisible until something specifically looks for them.
It is also the only part of link building you fully control. Nobody has to agree, nothing has to be earned, and a well-linked site is the entire mechanism by which a new page inherits any standing at all.
Common question
- How many internal links should a page have?
- As many as genuinely help a reader. There is no penalty threshold worth designing around, but a link nobody would click is not doing anything either.
Check this on your own site
- Site Audit
Crawl your site and group what is broken
Definitions are the easy part
The free plan opens every tool with 500 credits and no card, so you can see these numbers on your own site rather than in an example.
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