Internal linking means the pages of your website point to each other with ordinary links. Google uses links to discover new pages and to understand what a page is about, and it recommends that every page you care about gets a link from at least one other page on your site. The links you miss show up in five steps: pull every page from the sitemap, count only the links inside the body text, flag pages with zero or very few incoming links, search your other texts for passages that mention a topic without linking it, and check Search Console for queries where several of your pages compete. The last part no tool does for you: every match gets read before a link goes in.
On my site this is Sebastian's job, my AI employee for SEO and GEO; see AI for SEO and Blogging: How Sebastian Works. The whole audit routine is in How to Run an SEO Audit With AI. Everything on SEO and AI search lives on my AI SEO page.
What Google says about internal links
Google's page on link best practices (developers.google.com, last updated December 10, 2025, retrieved November 6, 2026) says:
- Links are a signal. Google says it uses links "as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl". Its SEO starter guide adds that "the vast majority of the new pages Google finds every day are through links".
- Only real links are safe. Generally, Google can only crawl a link if it is an
<a> element with an href attribute; links that only work through script events are not reliably extracted.
- Every important page needs at least one link. In Google's words: "Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site."
- There is no magic number. "There's no magical ideal number of links a given page should contain. However, if you think it's too much, then it probably is."
- Anchor text describes the target. Good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant. Cramming in every related keyword is keyword stuffing, which violates Google's spam policies. And don't chain links next to each other; each one needs its own context.
What Google does not say is that more internal links mean better rankings. PageRank, the algorithm that uses links, is in Google's words "just one" of many ranking signals. Internal links help pages get found and understood; whether they rank depends on the content.
An internal linking audit in five steps
List every page. Your XML sitemap is the fastest list; most systems publish it at /sitemap.xml. Search Console tells you whether Google has read the sitemap, see Setting Up Google Search Console.
Count body-text links only. Menus, footers, sidebars and "read more" cards sit on almost every page and link to the same places everywhere. Whether a page is woven into your content shows only in the article text.
Count incoming links per page and sort. For each page: how many other pages link to it from their body text? Zero is an orphan page. One or two is a candidate, especially for pages meant to bring in leads.
Find passages that mention the topic but don't link. For each weak page, search all your other texts for its topic, case-insensitive: once with the exact phrase, once with the shortest word that clearly carries the topic. A match is a candidate, not a finding; only reading tells you whether the sentence fits.
Cross-check Search Console. Show queries and pages together and look for queries where more than one of your pages appears. Then open both pages and check the actual links in both directions. Sebastian did this for my site on September 19, 2026: of 4,770 search queries, 205 pointed to more than one of my own pages, and when he pulled up the pages live, a strong overview page simply wasn't linking to the better target page.
When you add the link, write the sentence so it works without it and use the target's title or a natural phrase as anchor text. For small sites, my rule of thumb from SEO Basics for Small Businesses applies too: every important page within two clicks of the homepage. That is a rule of thumb, not a Google requirement. How a hub page and its posts work together is explained in my post on topic clusters.
A check of this website, November 6, 2026
On November 6, 2026, Sebastian ran steps 1 to 4 on kevinwelter.com, read-only. The sitemap listed 873 URLs, including 401 German and 401 English posts. He counted the body-text links of all 401 German posts from the files of the live version, without menus, cards and sidebars, and confirmed on 40 pages fetched one at a time that the files match what the server delivers: the 20 posts with the fewest incoming links and 20 drawn at random.
No orphan posts. That comes from the rule the site was built on: every hub page links its posts, every post links its hub and two to four neighbours. When we analysed the site in early September, four posts had no incoming link.
Step 4 was more telling. For the 20 weakest posts, Sebastian searched all other texts for each topic:
- With each post's exact search phrase he found 3 unlinked mentions, and all three fit.
- With the shorter umbrella term it was 98 matches. He read the 23 matches for the eight posts with short lists one by one: 4 were real opportunities, including the three from above. The rest used the word in another sense, such as the German "Makler" meaning an insurance broker when the target post is about real estate agents.
- He did not read the remaining 75 matches for three very common words such as "Docker" one by one. A word found in almost every technical post is no reason to link on its own.
The four opportunities are a proposal; they go in only after I approve. This is a snapshot of one website, not a rule for yours.
Internal linking tools: free first, then SE Ranking
For a small site, a free crawler is often enough; free tiers are compared in SEO Audit Tools Compared. Sebastian finds broken links with linkinator, a free command-line tool, and for the count above he wrote a small script: read the sitemap, cut out each page's text area, count the links. How helpers like that come together with Claude Code is in Claude SEO: SEO With Claude Code, Skills, MCP.
I have a partnership with SE Ranking, and I earn a commission through my links to SE Ranking. According to its product page, the SE Ranking Website Audit* flags pages with no inbound internal links and shows which internal pages link to 4XX URLs (retrieved November 6, 2026). In my own test I started the audit at the lowest crawl rate, because my website rejects too many requests in a short time, and one of the three false alarms was "links without anchor text" for icon links with aria-label. Check findings like that in the source code, and test how a tool counts menus and cards on a page whose links you know. The full test is in SE Ranking Review: API, MCP and Real Numbers.
* Affiliate link: if you subscribe or buy credits through this link, I earn a commission. Your price stays the same. I have a partnership with SE Ranking.
Common internal linking mistakes
- Links to redirects and error pages. After a rebuild, old links often lead nowhere. How to redirect old URLs properly is in Modernizing a Website With AI: How To.
- New posts nobody links to. The new post links to older ones, but no older post links back. Plan those links back when you publish.
- New pages Google doesn't know yet. Internal links from strong pages help discovery; when an extra request is worth it is in Google Indexing Request: When It Helps.
How Sebastian handles it on my site
Sebastian keeps a linking plan with incoming links per post and checks the real links after every release instead of only on paper. On other people's websites he follows crawl etiquette: on shared hosting, at most one request every three to five seconds. He puts nothing live himself; every change to a website goes through my explicit approval. How he works with and without a paid data tool is in AI Employee With and Without an SEO Tool.
Frequently asked questions
How many internal links should a post have?
There is no fixed number; Google says explicitly there is no ideal one. What matters is that every important page gets at least one link from a relevant text. On my site every post links its hub and two to four neighbours, which is our house rule, not a requirement.
What is an orphan page?
A page that no other page on your site links to. Search engines then find it mainly through the sitemap or external links, visitors hardly at all.
Do menu and footer links count?
Google can crawl them if they are <a href> links in the HTML. For your audit you still separate them, because they are the same on every page and don't tell you which page is part of your content.
What is the best internal linking tool?
A crawler gives you the links, Search Console the queries, a script or spreadsheet the count, and audit tools such as SE Ranking flag pages without inbound links. None of them decides whether a sentence deserves a link. An llms.txt file does not replace internal linking; see what an llms.txt file does and doesn't do.
Where to go from here
Download your sitemap today, take the ten pages that matter most to you and count how many texts link to each. Anything under two is your task for this week. If you'd rather start with a ready-made audit, run your site through the SE Ranking Website Audit*. If you want us to look at your website together, book a strategy session or write to me on the contact page. There's a finished package for Sebastian in my community AI Employee Framework. The next item after links is structured data. Whether your pages show up in AI answers is a separate measurement: AI visibility tracking.
* Affiliate link: if you subscribe or buy credits through this link, I earn a commission. Your price stays the same. I have a partnership with SE Ranking.
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