Internal linking, or how your pages hold together

The part on the sitemap and links ended on this observation, drawn from Google’s guide: pages are discovered by following links. You need to draw every consequence of that for the inside of your own site, because you are the one who decides which links exist there.

The orphan page does not exist

A page that no other page on your site points to is called an orphan page. The crawler will only find it by luck: an external link, a sitemap line. And even when found, it makes a poor showing: a page that its own site does not consider worth a link sends a clear signal about its importance.

The typical case is nothing exotic. It is the services page created for a campaign and never linked from the menu. It is the blog post published then buried by the ones that followed, now reachable only on page 4 of an archive nobody leafs through. It is the page whose address was changed while the links pointing to the old one were forgotten.

What a good internal link does, concretely

Three services at once. It gets the target page discovered by the crawler. It passes on a share of the originating page’s importance: a page cited by your homepage weighs more than a page cited by nobody. And its clickable text, the anchor, describes the target: Google explicitly recommends descriptive anchors, “see our maintenance pricing” rather than “click here”, because the anchor tells the engine and the reader what the destination page is about.

The reader first, in fact. Successful internal linking is not an exercise for robots: it is the text that, at the moment a neighbouring question comes up, hands over the page that answers it. If your internal links feel natural to a human reader, they are good; if they look like a list of underlined keywords, they are bad for everyone.

The depth rule

Count the clicks between your homepage and every page of the site. That number, the depth, is a good health indicator: an important page four or five clicks from the homepage is a page you yourself are calling secondary. On a site of ordinary size, everything that matters should sit within two clicks, three at most. You get there with section pages that list their content, a menu that exposes the real sections, and a breadcrumb trail that ties each page to its section.

Where to start on your own site

Take the list of your pages, the sitemap’s list if you have one, and ask three questions of each: who points to it; who does it point to; in how many clicks can it be reached from the homepage. An hour of this work almost always reveals a few orphans and a whole section buried too deep. The fixes are the least technical moves in this entire series: adding links where they are missing.

Next part: the content itself, what really matters in writing a page, and the list, drawn up by Google, of what achieves nothing.