Internal linking strategy template: plan and audit your internal links

Internal linking covers every link that takes a visitor from one page of your site to another: the main menu, breadcrumbs, links in the body copy, “related” blocks and the footer. External links point to other domains, and link building means earning links from other sites to yours. Internal links are fully under your control, which makes them one of the cheapest SEO levers you have.

Google’s documentation describes three ways internal links work. First, Google finds pages mainly through links from pages it has already crawled. Second, it uses links as a signal of what a page is about, and the anchor text tells both Google and the reader what to expect after the click. Third, every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site. A page without one is an orphan page: Google can only find it through your sitemap or external links, and visitors usually never reach it.

An internal linking strategy fixes what happens by accident on most sites. Authors link to whatever they remember, the menu grows for years, and the most important service pages end up with fewer links than an old blog post. The template turns that into a list of decisions: which pages matter most, which pages link to them, with what anchor text, and when you check that nothing has broken.

The template takes you from a baseline, through decisions about priorities and specific links, to measurement. Each part answers one question and lists where the data comes from, so you know what to pull together before you start.

You fill in parts 1 to 5 when you build the first plan and update them as new pages appear. Parts 6 to 8 are the ongoing rhythm: a review every quarter, and straight after any big change such as a new menu, a migration or a new blog section. If you already have an SEO strategy with keyword clusters, copy part 4 from it. New pieces from your content calendar go into part 5 on the day they are published.

The model that works for a company website, an online store and a blog alike is hub and spokes. The hub is the page that covers the topic most fully and sells most often: a service page, a store category or a topic guide. Spoke pages expand on its parts: costs, comparisons, how-to guides, case studies and customer questions.

The rules we apply for clients and on our own site:

• The hub links to every spoke, and every spoke links back to the hub.
• Every new piece links to its hub and to 2–4 related spokes in the same cluster, and the hub gets a link to the new piece on the day it goes live.
• Your most important business pages get the most internal links. If an old blog post has more links than a service page, the plan reverses that.
• Key pages sit no more than 3 clicks from the homepage. It’s the same threshold our SEO checklist uses in check B10.

A cluster is a group of keywords with the same intent, served by one page. That is why every hub in the map has its own primary keyword and no spoke targets the same one. If two pages compete for one query (keyword cannibalization), internal links won’t fix it. Merge the pages first, then plan the links.

Page series built from one template

Businesses that build many pages from one template, such as city pages, industry pages, comparisons or document templates, need a hub that links to every one of them. Without it, series pages quickly become orphans: they are in the sitemap, but nobody reaches them from the menu or the content. The minimum is a hub that lists the series, grouped the way customers search, for example by region or category. Each series page links back to the hub and to its 2–3 nearest neighbours, such as nearby cities. Links won’t rescue pages that differ only by the city name, though: every page in a series needs its own data.

Anchor text is the clickable text of a link. Google says good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to the page it sits on. It warns against generic text such as “click here” and against cramming every keyword related to the target page into the link. Keyword stuffing violates Google’s spam policies. The sentence around the link matters too: the words before and after it add context.

In the template you keep an anchor text register (part 3). For each important page, note a primary anchor, usually close to its primary keyword, and a few variants that fit naturally into different sentences. One rule is strict: the same anchor text never points to two different pages. If “pricing” leads to your service prices in one article and to product prices in another, neither readers nor search engines can tell which page answers that term.

For image links, the image’s alt attribute works as the anchor text. Google uses it that way, so don’t leave it empty. Also avoid chaining links next to each other: readers find them harder to tell apart, and each link loses the sentence that describes it.

How many links per page

There is no ideal number of links per page. Google says so directly, and adds that if you think there are too many, there probably are. In practice we follow the hub-and-spoke model: in the body of every article, a link to the hub and 2–4 links to related spokes. What matters more than the count is whether the link helps the reader take the next step.

Click depth and navigation

Every important page should be reachable within 3 clicks of the homepage. The menu and breadcrumbs provide a path to each section, and in-content links shorten the way to your service pages. Google recommends that breadcrumbs reflect a typical user path to the page rather than mirror the URL structure. You can mark them up with BreadcrumbList structured data.

Links Google can read

• An <a> element with an href attribute. Google can’t reliably extract URLs from <a> elements without href, or from links built with onclick or <span>. Links inserted with JavaScript are fine as long as they end up as a regular <a href> element.
• The canonical URL in the link. Google recommends linking to the canonical URL within your site rather than to a duplicate, such as a URL with a parameter. Our canonical tag guide covers this in detail.
• The final URL, not a redirect. When a URL changes, fix the link at the source, as in check A7 of the SEO checklist. Keep the redirect for external links and old bookmarks.
• No rel="nofollow" on links to important pages. Google describes this attribute in the context of outbound links. When you don’t want Google to fetch a URL on your own site, it points you to a disallow rule in robots.txt instead.
• Key links in the HTML your server sends. Google usually renders JavaScript, but some AI bots don’t run it, so keep menu and in-content links in the server-sent HTML.

An XML sitemap doesn’t replace links. Google says that if your pages are properly linked, it can usually discover most of your site, and that a sitemap helps most on large and new sites. On large sites it is harder to make sure every page is linked from at least one other page, and that is exactly where orphan pages tend to appear.

Internal linking breaks quietly: someone changes a URL, deletes a post, rebuilds the menu or adds a filter that creates hundreds of new URLs. That is why the template includes a quarterly internal linking audit with the same criteria every time, so you can compare the results.

You need three sources. A crawler such as Screaming Frog or Seobility walks your site like a search bot and shows click depth, links to errors and redirects, and sitemap URLs that no link points to. The Links report in Search Console shows which pages are linked most often within your site. It is a sample, and its tables are limited to 1,000 rows, so treat it as a cross-check rather than a complete list. For a quick check, our free SEO audit covers up to 25 pages and flags broken internal links, redirect chains and pages returning 4xx/5xx errors.

Every check that fails goes into part 5 (link plan) or part 7 (orphan pages) with a URL, an owner and a due date. We describe a full technical audit, with internal linking as one of its areas, on our SEO audit page. The audit is included in every SEO plan, and as a standalone service it starts at €350 net.

To find orphan pages, compare two lists: the URLs in your XML sitemap (or a CMS export) and the URLs a crawler reached by following links. Anything that appears only in the sitemap has no link from any other page. The second clue is Search Console: pages with impressions that the crawler didn’t find are usually orphans too.

Not every orphan is worth saving. Decide based on what the page delivers today and what it could deliver once it is linked:

A rule from our playbook: we check for orphan pages every quarter, and every page kept out of the index is there by decision, not by accident. Record the decision in part 7 of the template with a date, so the next review doesn’t analyse the same URLs from scratch.

• Random pages get the most links. The latest posts or an old guide collect links from across the blog, while the service page has a handful. On our own blog, the related-articles block once showed the two newest posts, so 19 of 20 articles linked to the same two, and our canonical tag guide had only 3 in-content links. Since 20 October 2026, every post has a hand-picked list of articles on the same topic.
• Generic anchor text such as “click here”, “more” or “here”.
• The same anchor pointing to different pages, or two pages competing for the same keyword.
• Links to redirects and errors after URL changes, especially after a site move. Our website migration checklist helps here.
• Links only in the menu and footer. They are needed, but they carry no sentence context. Service pages also need links from the body copy.
• Links Google can’t read, such as JavaScript buttons without an href attribute.
• New content with no incoming links. The article links to the hub, but neither the hub nor other cluster pages link back to it.
• A plan made once. Without a quarterly audit, links drift away from the site’s new structure.

If you would rather have a team that does this every day handle internal linking, content and technical SEO, see our SEO services. As part of ongoing work, we also improve internal linking architecture. For earning links from other sites, read our B2B link building guide.