How to Do Website Internal Linking Properly: Structures, Anchors, and Checks
Internal linking of a website is a system of internal links that readers and search crawlers follow between pages of the same resource. Proper internal linking is simple: every important page has at least one text link from a thematically related page, and the anchor makes it clear in advance what will open. The crawler then finds new pages faster, while the reader can get from an article to a service.
Why internal linking is needed
Search crawlers find pages primarily through links. Yandex Webmaster Help states this directly: the crawler works by following links, and may not discover a document that no other page links to. Google sets out the same requirement more briefly: every important page should receive a link from at least one other page on the site.
Internal linking between pages also affects indexing speed. Yandex warns that the deeper a page is, the more time may pass before it is added to the index.
The connection with AI model answers is indirect. In its documentation on AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google writes that an indexed page suitable for display with a snippet can become the source of an AI answer, and separately recommends making content accessible through internal links. Other reasons are covered in the article about why pages do not appear in AI answers.
Website internal linking structures
A website internal linking structure is a rule by which pages in one section link to one another. Menus, breadcrumbs, and footers are configured once in the template, so the structure primarily concerns contextual links within the text.
| Structure | How it works | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|
| Кластер | Обзорная страница ссылается на материалы темы, материалы ссылаются обратно на нее | Блоги, базы знаний, услуги с подуслугами |
| Иерархия | Раздел ведет в подраздел, подраздел в карточку | Интернет-магазины, каталоги |
| Справочник и статьи | Термин ссылается на подробные статьи, статьи на термин | Сайты с глоссарием или FAQ |
| С информации на коммерцию | Из статей и терминов ссылки ведут на услугу | Сайты B2B-услуг |
On our own site, we combine the last two structures. Google Search Console showed why a link to a commercial page is needed: from July – October 2026, the site received impressions for the queries «перелинковка услуги» and «заказать перелинковку», although we had only an informational page on the topic. Such a person is looking for a provider, not a definition, so the guide should link to search engine optimization, which includes an analysis of internal linking.
How to Build Internal Linking: A Step-by-Step Plan
- Compile a list of pages from sitemap.xml or a crawler export, with the number of incoming internal links for each.
- Group pages into clusters based on semantic core and assign a target page for the main query to each one. Two pages targeting the same query compete in search results, and internal linking does not fix this keyword cannibalization.
- Find donor pages that already receive impressions: they appear in the «Performance» report in Google Search Console and in the query statistics in Яндекс Вебмастера.
- Place contextual links where the paragraph relates to the topic of the target page.
- Link the new page in both directions: from it to related materials and from older materials to it.
- Submit the changed pages for recrawling in Яндекс Вебмастере and request indexing in Google Search Console. After recrawling, Яндекс included our article about the release of a new Anthropic model in search results in about 24 minutes.
The fifth step is skipped more often than the others: it requires routine work. To add a link from an article to a term, we had to check in a neighboring tab which terms had already been published. So we automated the connection between the blog and glossary: the script links the first mention of a term in the text, not in a heading or inside another link, once per term. The main difficulty is Russian morphology: the term appears in different cases, and an exact-string search misses it.
Anchors: what text to use for a link
An anchor is the visible text of a link. Google asks you to make it descriptive, reasonably short, and related to the context. The check is simple: read only the link text. If it is clear from the text what will open, the anchor works, while «learn more» and «here» do not pass this test. Google's second rule is not to force keywords into the text: «order website promotion cheaply» within a phrase signals over-optimization.
In the glossary-and-articles setup, we use different anchors depending on the direction. From an article to a term, the link is placed on the term itself. From the glossary to an article, its title in the «Where we wrote about this» section serves as the link, making it clear that the page contains a detailed analysis rather than a second definition.
It is useful to link to one page using different formulations. Cyrus Shepard of Zyppy SEO compared 23 million internal links across 1800 sites with clicks from Google Search Console: pages with more different anchors received more clicks. URLs with 0–4 internal links collected 2 clicks on average, those with 40–44 received four times more, while traffic declined after 45–50. The author calls the study correlational; it does not prove causation. Google does not specify an exact number of links per page.
Common internal linking mistakes
Links that the crawler cannot see. Google follows only the <a> tag <a> with an href attribute, while buttons with onclick and javascript: are not considered links. Яндекс recommends duplicating such links with regular text links.
Links to redirects. We simplified the glossary URLs: they used to be /glossary/ai/kontekstnoe-okno-context-window/ and became /glossary/kontekstnoe-okno, but the old URLs still appear in Google Search Console. The same applies to the trailing slash: /contacts/ returns a 301 to /contacts, while both versions received impressions. Links in the text should lead directly to the final canonical URL.
Links to 404 pages and duplicates. On one client site, 22 articles were accessible at two URLs, and they accounted for more than 90% of organic clicks. In such cases, internal links and canonical should point to one version.
Pages without incoming links. A page may be included in sitemap.xml, but if nothing links to it, the reader will not reach it.
How to check internal linking
In Google Search Console, the “Links” report shows which pages on the site receive internal links most often. Google warns that the report includes only some of the links, so it is suitable for an overview, not a full audit. If an important service is at the bottom of the list, the internal linking should be rebuilt. In Yandex Webmaster, the “Broken links” → “Internal” section shows links to unavailable pages, but is based only on pages known to the crawler. During audits, we crawl the site with our own crawler; for a one-off check, Screaming Frog SEO Spider will show click depth from the homepage, the number of incoming links, and the response code for each page.
Internal linking works with links within the same site, while link building works with external links to the site from other resources.
Almost not at all: a site with several pages can manage with a menu. Internal linking becomes critical when a blog, knowledge base, FAQ, or catalog is added.
Partly. Blocks of related articles, tag links, and breadcrumbs are generated automatically. Contextual links should be reviewed after automatic insertion: the algorithm also places them where readers do not need them.
It can help if the crawler simply cannot find the pages. It will not fix server errors, restrictions in robots.txt, or pages excluded as low-value or rarely requested. First, open “Crawl statistics” and the list of excluded pages in Webmaster.
With every publication and after changing URLs. After a migration or a change in the URL structure, check that links do not lead to redirects.
Conclusion
Internal linking starts with a cluster map: first decide which page answers the main query for the topic, and only then link to it from related materials using clear and varied anchors. If the page is weaker than competitors in terms of content, links will help the crawler find it but will not make it better.
