How many internal links per page?

What Google says

Two lines from Google's Link best practices (updated December 2025) cover it:

• "There's no magical ideal number of links a given page should contain. However, if you think it's too much, then it probably is."
• "Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site."

That is the whole official answer. There is no "100 links per page" limit today. That number came from very old Google advice, from a time when Google indexed only the first part of a page. Google has not used it as a rule for many years.

So any guide that gives you an exact number as fact is giving you its opinion. Ours is below, and we label it as ours.

Our rule of thumb (not Google's)

We think about it from two sides: the page you want to help (the target) and the page you add links to (the source).

Stop sooner if a link would not help the reader at that spot. A short product page may only need two links. A long guide may need ten.

Where links count most

Not every link is equal. Menus and footers are the same on every page, so they say little about any one page. Links inside your text carry the most meaning, because the words around them explain where they go.

When people worry about "too many links", it is almost always the menu and footer, not the body.

Signs you have too many

Use Google's test: if it looks like too much, it probably is. Concrete signs:

• Every second phrase is a link. Readers stop clicking when everything is blue.
• Links chained back to back with a few words each. Google's guide shows this as a bad example.
• A mega menu or footer with hundreds of links on every page. Visitors cannot use it, and it buries the links that matter.
• Many links to the same page from one page.
• Links to pages that do not help this reader, added only "for SEO".

Signs you have too few

This is the more common problem:

• Key pages have 0 to 2 internal links, all from menus.
• New posts are only linked from the blog index and slide off page 1 within weeks.
• Product or service pages get no links from your guides.
• Pages show up as "Discovered - currently not indexed" in Search Console. Weak internal linking can be one reason.

Find these pages with our orphan pages method or the Search Console internal links report.

Big footers and mega menus

Big menus are not a penalty. But they spread links thin and make every page look the same to Google. A better pattern:

1. Keep the main menu to your top sections.
2. Keep the footer to contact, legal and a few key pages.
3. Move long lists of links into hub pages that link to every page on one topic.

A quick count for your own pages

Worked example (fictional site). northwind-outdoors.com has a 1,600-word guide, "How to choose a sleeping bag". It had 2 in-body links. By our rule of thumb it could carry about 6 to 10. The team added 5: three to sleeping bag product pages, one to the sleeping pad guide, and one to the temperature rating guide. Each sits in the sentence where a reader would want it. The guide's menu and footer links were left alone.