If you want to improve your content's rankings, you need links. Google will find your pages and posts best when they are linked from other websites. Internal linking creates a network between all your content and gives Google insight into your website's structure.
By creating a hierarchy within the site, you can give more important pages more link relevance than other subpages. This allows you to improve your search engine optimization (SEO).SEO) significantly optimize. It is also important to ensure that internal linking improves the user experience by making it easier for users to find relevant content on the website.
Internal links are connections from one page on your website to other pages. Users and search engines alike use links to navigate and discover content. This allows visitors to easily browse your site and find the information they need. Furthermore, internal links help search engines display relevant results more effectively. Without internal linking, a website will never be found.
There are various types of internal links that are useful for your website. Besides the homepage link and menu items, you can also place contextual links within the content. These links relate to related topics and direct users to interesting content.
Furthermore, these links help search engines determine the relevant content of a website and adjust their ranking accordingly. The more links an important page receives, the more important it appears to search engines. Therefore, good internal links are crucial for your search engine optimization (SEO), which also includes image SEO and search query optimization.
Internal linking serves several purposes at once. It is beneficial for both Google and other search engines, as well as for users.
It's obvious that the internal link structure of a medium-sized website is important, as only a small percentage of URLs are linked by external backlinks. When Googlebot or other search engine crawlers visit a page, they follow the links according to the instructions in the robots.txt file. During this process, the bot also reads and interprets the anchor text. Internal links help the crawler by providing information about the thematic relationship between subpages within a domain.
By analyzing link text frequency, search engine crawlers can determine why a particular page is relevant for a specific search term – even without external backlinks or references to that page! A well-structured internal linking system can therefore contribute to both a good search engine ranking and a positive user experience. It's crucial to consider internal linking as an essential component of search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM), and to implement measures to improve it, including local SEO.
Internally linked content is clearly identifiable for users, whether as the main navigation or in a breadcrumb structure. This not only helps users navigate the website but also provides an opportunity to highlight related topics and interesting themes. This way, you can keep your visitors engaged and increase the time they spend on your site.
A good user signal can positively influence a website's search engine ranking. We can see how to do this correctly using Wikipedia as an example: there, visitors to an article can click on an "offer" to access further information, making it easier for users to search.
Here are some additional reasons why internal linking is important.
Google scans all websites by sending out the Googlebot. By navigating the homepage and clicking on links to other pages, the bot can instantly recognize how different pages, posts, and content are interconnected. Using this technology, Google discovers which topics are covered similarly and makes connections between them to provide a better user experience.
At the top of this post, for example, you'll see links to the tags "Content SEO," "Internal Linking," and "Site Structure." By adding these links, we ensure that Google understands that the content on those pages is related to the content of this post.
In today's world, given the ever-increasing complexity of websites, orphaned content can become a serious problem for many platform operators. Orphaned pages refer to those web pages on your website that have no internal links connecting them to others. This is problematic because search engine crawlers cannot find the page without an internal link and therefore cannot include it in their index – which is essential for generating revenue.
Although many websites nowadays have sitemaps that contain all the site's URLs, it can still take some time for search engines to reach these pages. This is especially likely for very large and dynamic websites or newly created pages, as Google crawls them infrequently. To give crawlers more opportunities to reach your content, add internal links to your newly published pages – this makes it easier for search engines.
Google not only understands the relationships between content, but also the link weight of all links on a page. Often, the homepage has the highest weight because it has more backlinks. This value is then applied to all other internal links and thus passed on to the subpages of the website.
Linking to your latest blog posts from your homepage, instead of just using the category page, will give them more link value. Furthermore, Google will be able to discover and index these posts much faster thanks to the direct link.
Once you grasp the concept that links pass on their value to other pages, you'll understand that more links to a website mean immense gains. Since Google ranks pages with many useful links higher, your chances of landing at the top increase.
Google confirms in its search engine optimization (SEO) guide that internal links do affect ranking. Google explains:
Create a naturally flowing hierarchy.
Make it easy for your users to find the specific content they're looking for on your website. Add navigation pages and effectively link them to your internal link structure. Ensure that all pages are accessible via links and don't require an internal search function to be found.
Furthermore, link to relevant pages where appropriate, so that users can discover similar topics! This makes it even easier for them to find exactly what they are looking for – without unnecessary complications or lengthy searches.
And in Google's "How Search Engines Work," internal links are defined as a ranking factor. Some pages are known because Google has already crawled them previously. Other pages are discovered when Google follows a link from a known page to a new page.
In 2009, Matt Cutts stated that there was a limit of 100 internal links per page. In the past, Google didn't download more than 100k pages from a single page (which is no longer the case), so the idea that links distributed your PageRank made sense. In 2013, Matt Cutts retracted this statement, saying, "Keep it to a reasonable number." The 100-internal-link rule is therefore no longer valid.
Internal links can be used to optimize the thematic organization of subpages and user navigation. They make it easier for users to navigate the website and increase the visibility of your content. To ensure a sensible link structure, webmasters and SEOs should pay attention to the following aspects:
© 2012-2025, MIK Group GmbH | General Terms and Conditions | Imprint | Privacy policy
