How internal links tell Google which pages matter

What an internal link is

An internal link is any link that goes from one page on your site to another page on the same site. The menu, the footer, the Book Now button and the underlined words inside a paragraph are all internal links.

Google finds most of your pages by following these links, and it keeps a running count of how many pages point at each one. A page with many links from your own site is treated as important. A page with one link, buried in a footer, is treated as an afterthought. The words inside the link matter as much as the count. A link that reads click here tells Google nothing. A link that reads monthly RV sites in Sandpoint tells Google exactly what the page on the other end is about, and it will use that phrase when deciding whether to show the page for that search.

What weak internal links look like on an RV park site

Pend Oreille Shores RV Park in Sandpoint has 62 sites at $54 a night, and it also rents 14 of those sites by the month from October through April. The monthly page is where the winter revenue comes from, and it is the page the owner most wants to rank.

The menu has five items and the monthly page is not one of them. It is linked once, from a line in the footer that reads Long-term. The homepage mentions monthly stays in a paragraph but the words are plain text, not a link. The Sites and Rates page lists the monthly rate in a table with no link either.

So the most valuable page on the site has exactly one internal link, with the vague anchor Long-term, from the least-read part of every page. The Photos page, which brings in no bookings on its own, has six links, because it is in the menu and every gallery thumbnail points back to it. When someone in Coeur d’Alene searches monthly RV sites Sandpoint, a competitor page with ordinary content but clear links will show above it.

A worked example: relinking a 62-site park in Sandpoint

Here is the count of internal links to each main page on the Pend Oreille Shores site, before and after the links were added. The count comes from the Links report in Google Search Console, which lists every page and how many of your own pages point at it.

The jump from 1 to 43 on the monthly page came from three changes. It was added to the menu, which put a link on every page at once. The homepage paragraph about winter stays became a link. And the Sites and Rates table got a link in the monthly row. The homepage paragraph looked like this before and after.

We also offer long-term stays during the off season. Contact us for details.

From October through April we rent 14 of our full-hookup sites as monthly RV sites in Sandpoint, with water, sewer and 50-amp power included in the monthly rate. The monthly page lists the rate, the sites that qualify and how to reserve one.

The after version links with the exact phrase a searcher types, and it tells the reader what they will find when they click. With 43 links instead of one, Google will crawl the monthly page as often as the homepage and will have a clear phrase to rank it for.

How to check your own internal links

1. Open Google Search Console for your site and click Links in the left menu. The lower half of that screen is headed Internal links and lists your pages with a count beside each. Sort by count and look at the bottom of the list. Any page you make money from that has fewer than five links is the page to fix first.
2. Open your homepage on your phone. Without using the menu, try to reach each of your service pages by tapping links inside the text. Any page you cannot reach in two taps needs a link from the homepage.
3. Search Google for site:yourdomain.com and note which pages appear on the first screen. Google shows the pages it thinks are most important, and if a photo gallery outranks your booking page, the links are telling it the wrong story.
4. Read the words inside each link. Any link that says click here, learn more or read more should be rewritten to name the page it goes to.
5. If your site has more than about forty pages, download the free version of Screaming Frog SEO Spider, crawl your domain, and sort the Inlinks column. It also shows which page each link comes from.

A page that is missing from the menu can also be missing from your XML sitemap, so check both together.

What we do about internal links

You will get a list of every page on your site with the number of internal links pointing at it, the pages that link to it, and the words used in each link. The pages that bring in bookings or calls will be linked from the menu, the homepage and every page on a related topic, using the phrase a customer would search for. Links that say click here will be rewritten. Menu changes are shown to you before they go live, and nothing on the design of the site changes. The same review covers broken links, since a link to a page that no longer exists counts for nothing. This is part of every site audit, which is where the work starts.

Questions people ask about SEO: how internal links tell Google which pages matter