Internal linking is linking from one page on your website to another page on the same site. Internal links help Google find your pages, understand what each one is about and how they relate, and help readers move to the next thing they need.
Google’s own minimum standard is simpler than most internal linking advice. Its link best practices say every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site, and that there’s no ideal number of links per page. Many B2B sites fail even that first test. Case studies, older blog posts and new service pages often have no internal links at all, so Google finds them only through the sitemap, if it finds them.
What makes a link work
Google can reliably follow a link only if it’s an HTML <a> element with an href attribute. Links built from buttons or script events with no href may not be followed. Links that JavaScript inserts are fine, as long as they use the same <a href> markup.
The anchor text, the clickable words, tells people and Google what the linked page is about. Google’s guidance gives examples of each:
| Anchor text | Verdict | Why |
|---|---|---|
| “Click here”, “Read more”, “this article” | Too generic | Says nothing about the destination |
| “MDR pricing models” | Good | Descriptive, concise and relevant to the linked page |
| A full sentence of linked text | Too long | Hides what the link is about |
| Keywords stacked into the anchor | Avoid | Google calls it keyword stuffing under its spam policies |
Google suggests a simple test: read the anchor text on its own. If you can’t tell what the linked page is about, rewrite it. Write naturally, and give each link surrounding words for context rather than stringing links together.
Internal linking on B2B sites
Internal links do the most work when they’re planned around topics. For a Canadian managed service provider, restructuring the site into content silos, with supporting pages linked to the main service page in each group, took target keyword rankings from page 4 to page 1 over five months. For an AI-native managed security provider, I set a scheduled internal linking calendar, so every new page was linked into the right group as it went live rather than months later.
Links also decide what crawlers reach. For a specialty paint manufacturer with more than 300 coatings, Google’s crawler wasn’t reaching the deeper product pages, so they weren’t indexed and couldn’t rank. Fixing the paths to those pages was part of the work behind a 47.7% rise in tracked leads.
On a site with 50 or more pages, improving internal links is often quicker to carry out, and quicker to show results, than publishing new content or building backlinks. You’re working with pages that already exist.
How to audit internal links
- List every page that matters commercially and check each has at least one internal link pointing to it.
- Find orphan pages with no internal links at all, and link them from related pages.
- Replace generic anchors with descriptive ones.
- Link from your most-visited pages to the service and comparison pages you want to rank.
- Check that menus and buttons use real
<a href>links.
Common mistakes
- Publishing pages without linking to them from anywhere on the site.
- Using “click here” and “learn more” as anchor text.
- Stuffing keywords into anchors, which Google treats as spam.
- Navigation built from script events that crawlers can’t follow.
- Adding links in one batch and never maintaining them as the site grows.
Related terms
Anchor text · Content silo · Topical authority · Crawl budget · JavaScript SEO
