Internal linking is the only part of ranking that is entirely yours. You do not have to persuade anyone to give you an internal link, you do not have to wait for one, and nothing outside your site can take it away. Which makes it strange how reliably it goes wrong.
The takeaway up front: almost every internal linking mistake falls into one of three groups — links that were never made, links a crawler cannot use, and links that carry no meaning. None of them look like errors while you are making them. Each one is the result of doing something sensible for a different reason: keeping the design clean, avoiding over-optimisation, shipping the article on time.
Below are seven of the common ones. For each: why it is tempting, the cheapest check that catches it, and what to do instead. None of the checks require a subscription and none take long.
Why internal links do more work than they look like they do
Three mechanisms, all worth holding in mind while you read the rest.
Discovery. A crawler finds pages by following links. A page nothing links to has to be found some other way — a sitemap entry, an external link — and pages found that way tend to be treated as lower priority than pages the site itself points at.
Emphasis. Where your own site sends its links is a statement about which of your pages matter. If everything on your site links to the homepage and nothing links to your best article, you have said something about your best article that you did not mean.
Context. The words in the link and the text around it describe the destination. That description is one of the few things you write about a page that does not live on the page.
The full picture of how these fit into ranking is in how search rankings work; this article is about the specific ways the linking part gets broken.
Mistake 1: Every link goes to the homepage
The classic. Mentions of the brand, the product, "our services" — all pointing at the root.
Why it is tempting. The homepage feels like the important page, and linking to it feels safe. It is also the URL everyone remembers without checking.
The cheap check. Crawl your site and sort pages by the number of internal links pointing at them. If the homepage's count is enormous and your commercially important pages are in single digits, this is you.
The fix. The homepage is already the most-linked page on any site by virtue of the navigation. Body links should go deeper — to the specific page that answers the specific thing the sentence is about. A link is a recommendation, and "here is our website" is not a recommendation anyone needed.
Mistake 2: The navigation is doing all the linking
Every page is linked from the menu or the footer, and nothing is linked from within any article.
Why it is tempting. It feels complete. Every page is reachable, the sitemap is clean, nothing is orphaned. Technically true, and it misses the point.
The cheap check. Open three of your best articles and count the links inside the body copy that go to other pages of your own. If the answer is zero on all three, the navigation is carrying the whole structure.
The fix. Template links — the same links on every page — establish reachability. Contextual links, inside the text, establish relevance, because they come with surrounding words that describe why one page relates to another. A site needs both, and the second one is the one people skip. Building those relationships deliberately is what topic clusters and pillar pages is about.
Mistake 3: Anchor text that says nothing — or says one thing every time
Two opposite errors with the same root cause. Either every link reads "click here" and "read more", or every link to a given page uses the identical exact-match phrase.
Why it is tempting. "Read more" is tidy and never looks spammy. The exact-match habit comes from the opposite instinct: if anchor text describes the destination, surely the ideal anchor is the target keyword, every time.
The cheap check. Export your internal links with their anchor text and scan the anchor column. Look for two patterns: a pile of generic anchors, and any destination whose incoming anchors are all byte-identical.
The fix. Describe the destination in the natural words of the sentence. Natural variation is the goal — the same page linked as "internal linking", "how internal links pass emphasis", and "our guide to site structure" is described more richly than the same page linked with one phrase ten times. Anchors that read as written by a person are also the ones that get clicked.
Mistake 4: Orphan pages nobody ever linked
A page gets published, promoted once, and never linked from anywhere again.
Why it is tempting. Nothing in a publishing workflow reminds you to update older pages. The article goes live, the task is closed, and the linking step has no owner.
The cheap check. Compare the list of URLs in your sitemap with the list of URLs your crawler finds by following links. Anything in the first list and not the second is orphaned. Search analytics gives a softer version of the same signal: pages indexed but receiving almost no impressions over a long period are often structurally invisible rather than badly written.
The fix. Make "link to this from two existing pages" part of publishing, not a later audit. And when a page will not index at all, thin internal linking is one of the standard causes worth ruling out — the rest are in why is my page not indexed.
Mistake 5: Links a crawler cannot follow
The link is visibly on the page but is not a real link: a button with a script handler, a menu that only builds after interaction, a "load more" control, or a path that only exists behind a filter or an internal search.
Why it is tempting. These are usually design or performance decisions, made by someone not thinking about crawling at all. The page looks fine to a human, which is exactly why nobody catches it.
The cheap check. View the page's rendered source and look for a genuine anchor element with a real destination in it. Or crawl the site with rendering off and see which pages disappear. Content inside tabs and accordions is generally fine when it is present in the markup; content that only exists after a click usually is not.
The fix. Anything you want crawled should be reachable by a plain link with a real URL. Keep the interaction if you want it, but let a real link sit underneath it.
Mistake 6: Links only ever point backwards
Every new article links to the older ones. No older article ever links forward to the new one.
Why it is tempting. It is the only direction that costs nothing at writing time. You know what already exists; you cannot link to what you have not written yet.
The cheap check. Take your five most recent pages and count how many internal links point at them from pages published earlier. If the answer is near zero, your newest and often most commercially relevant pages are sitting at the far edge of the site.
The fix. After publishing, search your own site for the two or three most relevant existing pages and add a link from each. Older pages are typically crawled more often, so a link from them is the fastest route into the new page.
Mistake 7: Linking together two pages that compete
Two of your pages target the same question, and you link them to each other because they are obviously related.
Why it is tempting. They are related. Linking related things is the whole idea.
The cheap check. Look at which of your URLs receive impressions for the same query. If two show up for the same set of terms and swap positions over time, they are competing rather than complementing.
The fix. Decide which page owns the query, then link the other page to it rather than in both directions — and consider whether they should be one page at all. That decision belongs to keyword cannibalization, because linking cannot fix a structural overlap.
The one-sitting audit
In a single session you can catch most of the above:
- Crawl the site and export internal links with anchors and destinations.
- Sort by inbound internal links, ascending. The bottom of that list is your problem list.
- Diff the crawl against the sitemap to find orphans.
- Scan anchors for generic phrases and identical repeats.
- Check internal redirects and broken links — these accumulate silently after any URL change, and the site migration checklist covers cleaning them up.
- Add links from the top down: pick your strongest pages and link out from them to the pages you most want to move.
Do that, then leave it alone for a while. Internal linking rewards deliberate structure, not constant fiddling — the wider on-page picture is in on-page SEO.
FAQ
How many internal links should a page have? There is no correct number, and any specific figure you are given is somebody's rule of thumb. Link where a link genuinely helps the reader get to the next thing, and make sure your important pages receive links, not just send them.
Do links in the footer count the same as links in the body? They are treated differently in practice, because a link repeated on every page carries less signal about any particular page than one written into relevant text. Footers are for reachability; body links are for emphasis.
Should internal links open in a new tab? That is a usability preference, not a ranking question. Pick one behaviour and apply it consistently.
Is it a problem to link to the same page several times from one article? It is mostly redundant rather than harmful. The first link is the one that carries the description; the rest add clutter and split the reader's attention.
Do nofollow attributes help me steer internal links? Adding them to your own internal links is not a reliable way to control emphasis, and it usually just removes a link's value. Control structure by deciding what to link, not by annotating links you have already made.
Internal linking is cheap, reversible, and entirely yours — which is why it is worth doing on purpose rather than as a side effect of writing. Start with the pages nothing points at. For more practical guides on structure, tracking, and on-page work, visit SBRanker.
