What is Internal Linking?
Last updated: March 2026
Internal linking is the practice of linking from one page on your site to another. Internal links help search engines discover and crawl your pages, distribute page authority, and establish topical relationships between content.
Every page on your site has some amount of authority (sometimes called "link equity" or "PageRank"). Internal links pass a portion of that authority to the pages they link to. Your homepage typically has the most authority because it gets the most external links. Internal links from your homepage flow authority to your key pages, which then pass it to deeper pages.
For programmatic SEO, internal linking is structural, not editorial. When you have 300 pages, you can't manually decide which pages should link to which. You need a systematic approach. The most common pattern is hub-and-spoke: a category page (hub) links to all related individual pages (spokes), and the spokes link back to the hub and to each other where relevant.
Cross-linking between related pSEO pages is especially valuable. A comparison page for "Product A vs Product B" should link to the comparison for "Product A vs Product C" and the alternative page for "Product A alternatives." These connections help Google understand the relationship between your pages and help users find what they're looking for.
A common internal linking mistake in pSEO is creating orphan pages: pages that exist in your sitemap but aren't linked from anywhere on your site. Google may still find them through the sitemap, but they'll receive no authority from internal links and will struggle to rank. Every pSEO page should be reachable from at least one other page.
Tools like pseo pro generate an internal link map as part of every plan. The link map identifies which pages should cross-link based on shared topics, keywords, and page types. This means your coding tool can implement the links automatically rather than requiring manual curation after launch.
Frequently asked questions
How many internal links should a page have?
There's no hard limit, but 3-10 contextually relevant internal links per page is a good range. The links should be genuinely useful to readers, not just placed for SEO. For pSEO pages, 5 internal links per page connecting to related pages in other patterns is effective.
Do internal links pass PageRank?
Yes. Internal links distribute page authority across your site. Your homepage typically has the most authority, and internal links flow that authority to deeper pages. This is why orphan pages (pages with no internal links pointing to them) struggle to rank.
What's the best anchor text for internal links?
Use descriptive anchor text that tells readers and search engines what the linked page is about. 'Learn about keyword cannibalization' is better than 'click here.' For pSEO, use the target keyword of the destination page as anchor text when it reads naturally.