What is Internal Link?
A link between pages on the same site, guiding discovery and distributing relevance. Controlled tests show deliberate internal-link changes lifting organic traffic 5–25%, and underlinked priority pages are a standard audit finding.
Example
Linking six related regional pages together produced a measured 7% traffic uplift in one controlled test: starved architecture fed with genuinely useful connections.
What people get wrong
Stuffing footers with keyword-rich links and calling it architecture. Prominence redistribution has losers as well as winners across the destination set.
Related terms
Topic Cluster
A pillar page surrounded by interlinked subtopic pages. Clusters make coverage legible to crawlers and readers at once, and internal links bind them into one structure.
Anchor Text
The clickable words of a link, telling engines what the target is about. Descriptive anchors help; exact-match anchors at scale invite manipulation scrutiny.
Crawl Depth
Clicks from the homepage to reach a page. Deep pages get crawled less often and inherit less prominence; priority content belongs within a few hops with internal-link support.
Off-Page SEO
Everything that builds a site’s reputation elsewhere: backlinks, mentions, reviews, and digital PR. Off-page signals validate what on-page content claims about expertise.
Referring Domain
A unique site linking to you. Domain diversity matters more than raw link counts: 100 links from one site look like one relationship, not 100 votes.
Link Equity
The ranking value passed through a link, shaped by the source’s authority, relevance, and number of outbound links. Internal links distribute equity; external links earn it.