Internal link vs external link
| Item | Internal link | External link |
|---|---|---|
| Points to | A page on your own site | A page on another site |
| Example | yoursite.com/blog to yoursite.com/pricing | yoursite.com/blog to wikipedia.org |
| Who controls it | You | The other site controls the page you link to |
| Main SEO job | Help Google find and understand your pages | Cite sources and help readers |
When another site links to you, that is a backlink. You can't add backlinks yourself. You can add internal links any time.
The four kinds of internal links
- Navigation links: your main menu. They appear on every page.
- Footer links: contact, legal and a few key sections, at the bottom of every page.
- In-body links: links inside a sentence in your content. These carry the most context, because the words around them explain where they go.
- Related or next-step links: "Related guides" blocks, breadcrumbs, and "Next: step 2" links in a series.
Menus and footers are the same on every page, so they say little about any one page. In-body links are where you have the most control.
What an internal link looks like in code
Google can only follow a link that is a real HTML link: "Google can only crawl your link if it's an <a> HTML element with an href attribute" (source).
| Google can follow | Google can't follow |
|---|---|
<a href="/guides/hiking-boots">hiking boots guide</a> | <span href="/guides/hiking-boots"> |
<a href="https://yoursite.com/pricing"> | <a onclick="goto('/pricing')"> with no href |
The clickable words are the anchor text. Google says good anchor text is "descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant," and calls "Click here" and "Read more" weak examples.
Why internal links matter for SEO
- Discovery. Googlebot follows links. A page with no internal links (an orphan page) may only be found through your sitemap. Pages many clicks deep get found later.
- Meaning. The anchor text and the sentence around it tell Google what the target page is about.
- Readers. Good links help visitors find the next useful page, which is the point.
Most sites have a lopsided pattern: a few pages get every link and many pages get almost none. Those forgotten pages are often the ones that could rank with a little help.
How to see a page's internal links
Two free ways:
- Google Search Console. Open *Links > Internal links > Top linked pages*. You see which of your pages get the most internal links. Google notes this report "shows a sample" and tables stop at 1,000 rows (Links report help).
- A crawler. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is free up to 500 URLs (screamingfrog.co.uk). After a crawl, the *Unique Inlinks* column shows how many pages link to each URL, and *Crawl Depth* shows how many clicks it is from your homepage.
The 30-second test of a good internal link
- Would a reader click it at this exact spot?
- Does the anchor describe the page it goes to?
- Is it a real
<a href>link? - Does it go straight to the final URL, with no redirect?
- Is the target indexable, and its own canonical? Google says to "link to the canonical URL rather than a duplicate URL" (source).
- Is it free of
rel="nofollow"?
Six yes answers means the link counts.
How to add better internal links
The short version: find pages with impressions but few clicks in Search Console, then add 3 to 5 descriptive in-body links to each from pages on the same topic that already get clicks (our rule of thumb). Our free internal link SEO playbook walks through it step by step, with a worked example and a 1-week checklist.
How to use this with an AI assistant
Connect SEOmatic at https://seomatic.ai/mcp and ask: "Use site_pages crawl on mysite.com/my-page and list every internal link on it with its anchor text. Flag any that use vague anchors, point to a redirect, or carry nofollow." Sign in with connect_seomatic first; reading is free.