What is an Internal Link?

Internal links help search engines understand the structure of a website and how its pages are related to each other. They also help visitors navigate a site more easily.

Search engines take them seriously, too. Google's John Mueller called internal linking "one of the biggest things you can do on a website to guide Google and visitors to the pages that you think are important" in a Google SEO office-hours video, quoted in Ahrefs' internal links guide (updated March 10, 2026). That's why internal linking plays a key role in on-page SEO and overall SEO strategy.

How internal links work

Google's crawlers discover a new page by following a link from a page they already know, so a page that nothing links to may never be crawled or indexed at all. Google's link best practices describe links as a signal for how relevant pages are and as the way Google finds new pages to crawl. One technical caveat from that doc: Google can generally only crawl a link that's an HTML anchor element, an <a> tag with an href attribute, and it can't reliably extract URLs from elements that only act like links through script events.

Internal links also pass ranking authority (often called link equity or PageRank) between your own pages, so linking from your strongest pages helps the pages you want to rank. They don't raise your Domain Authority, though: Moz calculates that score from the quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to your site from other websites, as its Domain Authority guide (updated March 18, 2025) explains.

Finally, internal links give search engines context through anchor text, the clickable text in a link. A descriptive anchor like "website navigation best practices" tells both readers and Google what the destination page is about before anyone clicks; a generic anchor like "click here" tells them nothing. Make the anchor describe the page it points to.

Types of internal links

Most internal links fall into a few types:

• Contextual links: placed in the body of a page to point readers to related content, like most of the links in this glossary.
• Navigation menu links: the header menu that repeats on every page of the site.
• Breadcrumb links: the trail near the top of a page that lets readers step back up the site hierarchy.
• Footer links: site-wide links at the bottom of every page, such as contact and policy pages.
• Related-post links: lists of similar articles, usually at the end of a blog post.

In HTML, an internal link looks like any other link, just with a destination on your own domain: <a href="/blog/seo-basics/">our SEO basics guide</a>.

Internal links vs. external links

The difference comes down to where the link points and who controls it:

• Internal link: points to another page on the same site. You control the placement, the anchor text, and the quantity, and each one spreads authority among your own pages.
• External link: points from your site to a page on a different website. It sends readers away and vouches for the source you're citing.
• Backlink: a link that points to your site from someone else's website. Links between your own pages never count as backlinks, though they do spread the authority your backlinks bring in. How much a backlink helps depends on factors like the linking site's relevance, where the link sits on the page, and how search engines treat it.

Internal linking best practices

Internal linking works best as a habit, not a cleanup project:

• When you publish a new page, link to it from every existing page where the topic genuinely fits. Starting with 2 or 3 closely related pages is a practical habit, not an official threshold.
• Write anchors that describe the destination, not "click here" or "read more".
• Keep your most important pages within a few clicks of the homepage.
• Audit your site a few times a year with a site crawler or Google Search Console. Look for orphan pages (pages with no internal links pointing to them, which crawlers may never find) and broken links (they lead to 404 errors that waste crawls and frustrate readers).

A few minutes of linking when you hit publish beats untangling an unlinked site later.