How do you plan internal links, choose anchor text and fix orphan pages?

Internal linking for SEO means connecting pages on your own site with crawlable HTML links so that search engines can find every important page and understand what each one is about, and so that readers can move to the next useful page. Google states the baseline plainly: "Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site," and the anchor text should be "descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant" to both pages.

Most sites do not fail at internal linking because they lack a clever strategy. They fail because new pages are published without links pointing to them, anchor text says "read more," and old posts never get updated. This guide gives you a simple plan, anchor text rules with examples, and a repeatable routine for finding orphan pages.

Why do internal links matter for SEO?

Internal links do three jobs at once.

1. Discovery. Google says it uses links "to find new pages to crawl." A page with no internal links depends entirely on your sitemap or external links to be found, and it is easy for it to be crawled rarely.
2. Context. Anchor text and the surrounding sentence tell Google what the linked page is about. Google's documentation describes links as a signal for determining relevance, and anchor text on links pointing to a page is one of the sources Google can use when it builds the page's title link in results.
3. Priority. Pages that many relevant pages link to are, in practice, the ones a site presents as most important. Burying a key page five clicks deep sends the opposite message.

Internal links also matter for AI assistants that browse the web. When an assistant lands on one of your pages, clear links to related, more specific pages help it find the passage that answers the question. Our guide to how LLMs choose sources goes deeper on that.

What makes an internal link crawlable?

Google states that it "can generally only crawl your link if it's an <a> HTML element" with an href attribute, and that links in other formats, such as a <span> with an href or a script event without one, "won't be parsed and extracted reliably." The URL also has to resolve to a real address.

Link markup	Reliable for Google?
<a href="/blog/schema-markup-guide">schema markup guide</a>	Yes
<a href="https://example.com/guide">...</a>	Yes
<a onclick="goTo('guide')">...</a>	No, there is no href
<span href="/guide">...</span>	No, not an anchor element
<a href="javascript:goTo('guide')">...</a>	No, the URL does not resolve

This is the most common hidden problem on JavaScript-heavy sites: menus, "related posts" widgets and blog indexes that render links only after scripts run, or not as anchor elements at all. Check the raw HTML or the URL Inspection tool's rendered HTML, not just what you see in the browser. Our technical SEO audit guide covers rendering checks.

How do you plan internal links between pages?

A plan does not need software. It needs a list of pages, a few decisions and a spreadsheet.

1. List your priority pages

Write down the pages that make money or carry your main topics: product and category pages, service pages, and the guides that answer your most valuable questions. Usually that is ten to thirty pages, even on large sites.

2. Group pages into topic hubs

For each main topic, choose one hub page that gives the overview, then list the supporting pages that cover subtopics in depth. Supporting pages link up to the hub, the hub links down to each supporting page, and supporting pages link across to siblings where a reader would genuinely want to go next. This is the structure people call topic clusters. Our keyword gap analysis guide helps you decide which supporting pages are missing.

3. Find your strongest linking sources

In Search Console, sort pages by clicks and impressions. Pages that already earn search traffic, and pages with external links pointing at them, are the best places to add links to pages you want to grow. A link from a page nobody visits does little for readers or for discovery.

4. Keep important pages shallow

Every priority page should be reachable within a few clicks from the homepage through normal navigation or hub pages. Paginated archives that push older posts ten pages deep are a common cause of weak, rarely crawled content.

5. Add links when you publish, and when you update

When you publish a page, add two or three links to it from existing related pages in the same session, not "later." When you update an older page, check whether newer pages deserve a link from it. This single habit prevents most orphan pages.

How should you choose anchor text?

Google's guidance is that anchor text should be descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to both the page it is on and the page it points to. Its own examples make the point better than any rule:

Type	Example	Verdict
Generic	"Click here to learn more."	Bad: says nothing about the destination
Descriptive	"See the list of cheese types."	Good: names what the reader gets
Too long	A whole sentence wrapped in one link	Bad: dilutes what the link is about
Image link	An image with alt text "add enchiladas to your cart"	Good: Google uses the alt attribute as anchor text

Practical rules that follow from it:

• Name the destination's topic, in the words a reader would use. "our guide to writing meta titles and descriptions" is better than "this post."
• Vary naturally. Different pages can describe the same target in different ways. Forcing the exact same keyword phrase into every link reads as unnatural and adds nothing.
• Mind the surrounding sentence. Google says to pay attention to the words around the link; they give context too.
• Do not chain links. Google advises against placing many links directly next to each other. Readers cannot tell them apart, and neither can a parser.
• Use alt text on image links that describes the action or destination.

How do you find orphan pages?

An orphan page is a page that exists and may be indexed, but that no other page on your site links to. Crawlers that follow links cannot reach it, so you find orphans by comparing lists.

1. Build the "known URLs" list. Combine your XML sitemap, a CMS export of published pages, Search Console's Performance report pages and your analytics landing pages for the last year.
2. Build the "linked URLs" list. Crawl the site with a crawler that follows links only, starting from the homepage, without feeding it the sitemap.
3. Subtract. Any URL in the first list but not the second is an orphan candidate. Most crawlers can do this automatically if you give them the sitemap and analytics data.
4. Check each candidate. Is it a page you care about? Is it current? Is it a duplicate of another page?

What should you do with each orphan?

Situation	Action
Useful and current	Add links from its hub and two or three related pages
Useful but outdated	Update it, then link to it
Duplicates another page	Merge into the stronger page and redirect
No longer needed	Remove it, return 404 or 410, and take it out of the sitemap
Intentionally unlinked (campaign landing pages)	Leave unlinked, and consider noindex if it should not appear in search

How often should you review internal links?

Treat internal linking as maintenance, not a one-off project. A light routine works for most sites: add links to every new page on the day it is published, run a links-only crawl once a month to catch new orphans and broken links, and do a fuller review each quarter of your hubs and priority pages. During the quarterly review, check that each hub still links to its best supporting pages, that retired pages no longer receive links, and that pages gaining impressions in Search Console get links from more of their siblings. Run an extra crawl after any redesign, migration or change to URL structure, since those are the moments when large numbers of links break at once.

What internal linking mistakes should you avoid?

• Nofollow on internal links. It tells Google not to associate your pages; there is rarely a good reason to do it on your own site.
• Links through redirects. Update internal links to point at the final URL rather than relying on redirect chains.
• Broken links after migrations or slug changes. Crawl after every structural change.
• Sitewide footer lists as a substitute for context. Navigation helps discovery, but contextual links inside the body carry the most meaning.
• Linking everything to everything. Link where a reader would want to go next. Too many links on a page make each one less useful.

If you want this done for a large site, our Blog Ranking service includes internal link mapping, and our expertise page and case studies show how we approach site architecture.

Sources

• Google Search Central, "SEO link best practices for Google", last updated December 10, 2025, accessed November 9, 2026. developers.google.com
• Google Search Central, "Influencing title links in Google Search", last updated December 10, 2025, accessed November 9, 2026. developers.google.com

Frequently asked questions