Internal linking

Internal linking is how pages on a site connect to each other. It does three jobs that compound. It distributes link equity, the ranking value passed by links, from strong pages to the ones that need it. It defines structure, telling engines which pages are important hubs and how topics relate. And it aids discovery, giving crawlers paths to every page and signaling, through anchor text, what each linked page is about.

The strategic version is the hub-and-spoke or topical-map structure: a pillar page on a topic links out to detailed sub-pages, which link back to the pillar and across to siblings, forming a dense cluster that reads as comprehensive coverage. Descriptive anchor text matters, "merchant cash advance requirements" tells the engine more than "click here", and so does proximity, a link inside relevant body content carries more weight than one buried in a footer.

The common failures are orphan pages with no internal links pointing to them (which crawlers struggle to find and engines treat as unimportant), over-linking with repetitive anchors, and a flat structure where every page links to every other page, which dilutes the signal about what matters. We visualize the internal link graph, detect orphans, identify hubs, and show where link equity is pooling or leaking.