Internal link: A link from one page on a website to another page on the same website — the same domain, including its menus, footers and every link written into a post.
What they do
Internal links do three jobs at once. They let crawlers discover pages — Google says it can only reliably crawl links that are <a> elements with an href. They describe the target through their anchor text. And they move readers on to the next useful page, which is the job most sites forget.
Not all internal links are equal. A link in the main menu repeats on every page and says little about any one of them. A link inside a sentence of a related post — a contextual link — carries the context of that sentence and is the one readers actually click.
An example
A local plumber’s site has a service page for boiler repairs, linked only from the menu. Its blog has a post on “why your radiator is cold at the top”. Adding one link from the sentence “if bleeding the radiator doesn’t fix it, the boiler pressure may be too low” to the boiler-repair page turns a reader with a problem into a reader looking at the service that fixes it.
How to see yours
- Google Search Console’s Links report shows a sample of the internal links Google has found, by target page.
- Rank Math and Yoast SEO both add internal link counts to the WordPress posts list, and most internal linking plugins for WordPress have a links report of their own.
- A crawler gives you every link with its source, target and anchor.
The internal linking strategy guide covers which links to add first and a routine for keeping it up.