While earning external links takes time, relationships, and sometimes budget, internal linking (the links between pages on your own website) is entirely under your control, doesn't depend on anyone else, and doesn't cost a euro. Even so, it's one of the most neglected areas of technical SEO: most websites link well from the main menu and stop there, leaving the rest of the pages practically isolated from one another.
What internal linking actually does
Every link between two pages on your site serves three purposes at once: it helps Google find and crawl that page, it distributes part of the authority your domain already has towards less visible pages, and it reinforces, through the context surrounding the link, what those pages are really about. None of those three functions depends on anyone outside your own website.
The most common mistake: linking only from the menu
The navigation menu spreads authority evenly across a handful of main pages, but says very little about the topical relationship between specific pieces of content. A blog post on a given subject should naturally link to another related post, or to the corresponding service page, and yet on most blogs each entry lives isolated, with no inbound links other than the blog listing itself.
Anchor text matters more than it seems
A link with the text "click here" tells Google nothing about the destination content. A link with the text "how to calculate your campaigns' ROAS" does, because it describes what that page is about in real words. There's no need to force it or repeat the exact same phrase every time: describing the destination naturally, the way any person would, is enough.
Orphan pages: content nobody links to
This is what pages that exist on your site but receive no internal links from anywhere else on it are called. Google can take a long time to find them through natural crawling, or may never find them at all if they're missing from the sitemap. It's surprisingly common to find important service pages, or old articles with good content, completely orphaned after a redesign or a menu reorganisation.
How many internal links are too many?
There's no magic number, but there is a useful rule of thumb: every link should make sense for the reader, not just for the search engine. A page with forty forced, unnatural internal links passes less authority through each one than a page with eight well-chosen, relevant links. Quality and relevance outweigh sheer quantity.
How to audit yours without complicated tools
A Screaming Frog crawl shows how many inbound internal links each URL on your site has, making it easy to spot both orphan pages and pages overloaded with outbound links at a glance. Search Console's "internal links" report gives a similar picture straight from Google's own crawl data.
Frequently asked questions
Does internal linking replace earning external links?
No, they're complementary. External links bring a trust signal you can't generate yourself; internal linking distributes that trust, once earned, across every page on your site.
Should I review internal linking every time I publish new content?
Yes, it's the best moment to do it: when you publish a new article or page is when it's easiest to spot which related older content you should link from there, and which other pages should link towards the new content.
Do internal links in the footer count the same as ones in the body text?
They count, but with less relative weight: a link inside the content, surrounded by relevant text on the same topic, usually carries a clearer signal than a generic link repeated in the footer of every page.