What is Internal Linking?
Internal linking is the practice of connecting pages within the same website using hyperlinks. Internal linking distributes ranking authority, helps crawlers discover pages, and guides users to related content.
Why Internal Linking matters
Internal links are the one ranking lever fully under your control. They tell crawlers which pages exist and how important they are, pass authority from strong pages to weaker ones, and give readers the next step. A page with no internal links pointing at it is an orphan: it may sit in the sitemap, but search engines treat it as unimportant, and visitors never find it.
Anchor text does double duty here. Descriptive anchors ('our Core Web Vitals guide') tell both the reader and the crawler what the target is about; 'click here' tells neither. The best internal links sit in the body of related content, not only in navigation and footers, because contextual links carry the most weight.
Example
Inside a guide on page speed:
<p>Most of that delay is the server, which you can diagnose with a
<a href="/learn/performance-hosting-ttfb">TTFB check</a>.</p>Related pages link both ways: the TTFB guide links back to the speed guide.
Common mistakes
- •Orphan pages that exist only in the sitemap.
- •The same generic anchors ('read more', 'here') everywhere.
- •Hundreds of links in a mega-footer, which dilutes each one and buries the ones that matter.
How Webmatik checks it
Webmatik's Internal linking check counts the links on each audited page and flags pages with too few, while Broken internal links verifies that every internal link resolves, retrying with a GET request when a server rejects HEAD requests.
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