Internal links are the SEO work you control
Zyppy analysed 23 million internal links across 1,800 websites, roughly 520,000 pages, and matched each page against its Google Search Console click data. Pages receiving 40 to 44 internal links from elsewhere on their own site drew around four times the organic traffic of pages with almost none. Traffic rose with link count until about that point, then flattened.
The same dataset found that anchor text variety mattered as much as volume. Pages linked with a range of different descriptive phrases outperformed pages linked repeatedly with the same one, and both beat pages linked with “click here” or “read more” by a wide margin.
Why this is the lever worth pulling first
Most SEO advice spends its energy on backlinks, and backlinks do matter. But a backlink is a decision somebody else makes about your site. You can ask, earn, or occasionally pay for one, and the result is slow and uncertain.
Internal links are entirely yours. You decide which pages link where, with what words, and you can change all of it this afternoon. For most businesses the site’s own link structure is the largest ranking factor nobody has deliberately managed.
Google has said as much for years. Its crawler discovers pages by following links, judges what a page is about partly from the anchor text pointing at it, and uses link structure to work out which pages the site considers important. A page with one inbound link from the footer is telling Google it barely matters.
The three things internal links do
They get pages found. A page that nothing links to is an orphan. Google may still find it through the sitemap, but it will be crawled rarely and ranked weakly. Sites with thousands of pages almost always have a long tail of orphans that nobody knows about.
They pass authority. When a strong page links to a weaker one, some of the strong page’s standing flows through. A blog post that ranks well and links to a service page is doing the service page a favour. The homepage, usually the most linked-to page on any site, is the biggest reservoir, and where it links is the single largest decision.
They tell Google what a page is about. Anchor text is a label. Fifteen pages linking to your pricing page with the word “pricing” in the anchor make it extremely clear what that page is for. Fifteen links reading “learn more” say nothing.
Structure beats volume
The Zyppy numbers plateau after 40-odd links because at that point the page is clearly important and additional links add noise. The gain comes from structure. Cramming links into every paragraph adds nothing.
The structure that works is a hub with spokes. One authoritative page on a topic, linked to and from every narrower page about that topic, with the narrower pages linking to each other where it genuinely helps. A service page as the hub, guides and case studies as spokes. A category page as the hub, product pages as spokes.
Silos that never link across each other leak nothing and rank as isolated islands. Sites that link everything to everything spread authority so thin that no page stands out. The hub-and-spoke shape concentrates authority where you want it and gives Google an unambiguous map of what the site is about.
We built Site Structure to do exactly this analysis on a crawled site: cluster the pages into topical groups, draw the map, and show where the linking is thin. It exists because doing it by hand on a site of any size is tedious enough that nobody does it.
Where sites go wrong
Navigation-only linking. Every page links to the same ten header and footer pages, and nothing else. Google discounts site-wide navigation links heavily because they carry no information about which pages relate to which. The links that matter are the ones in the body of the content.
Generic anchors. “Click here”, “read more”, “this article”. A link’s anchor text is the one place you get to tell Google what the destination is about, and generic anchors throw that away.
Over-optimised anchors. The opposite failure. Every link to a page uses the identical exact-match phrase, which reads as manipulation because it is. Vary the wording the way a human writer naturally would.
Orphaned money pages. It is common for the pages a business most wants to rank, the service and product pages, to receive fewer internal links than a three-year-old blog post, because the blog posts link to each other and nobody thought to link them back to the commercial pages.
Redirected and broken links. Links pointing at old URLs pass through a redirect, which Google follows but discounts. Links to deleted pages pass nothing. Both accumulate silently on any site older than a year. On this site, every internal link ends in a trailing slash for exactly this reason: a link without one costs the visitor a redirect before the page loads.
| Failure | How it shows up | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Navigation-only linking | Every page links to the same ten header and footer pages and nothing else | Add contextual links in the body copy |
| Generic anchors | “Click here”, “read more”, “this article” | Describe the destination in the anchor |
| Over-optimised anchors | Every link to a page uses the identical exact phrase | Vary the wording naturally |
| Orphaned money pages | Service and product pages with fewer inbound links than old blog posts | Link commercial pages from the content that already ranks |
| Redirected or dead links | Links to old or deleted URLs, accumulating for years | Crawl, then fix the targets |
A working method
Crawl the site and export every page with its inbound internal link count. Sort ascending. The pages at the top of that list are your orphans and near-orphans, and some of them will be pages you care about.
Next, list the ten pages that matter most commercially. For each, count inbound internal links and read the anchor text. If a service page has three inbound links and two of them say “learn more”, you have found the work.
Then go through the content that already ranks. Old guides and blog posts with steady traffic are the best link sources on the site, because they already have authority and Google already crawls them often. Add a contextual link from each to the relevant hub page, with a descriptive anchor.
Fix the redirects and the dead links while you are in there. Then rerun the crawl in three months and compare.
This overlaps with structured data and the technical work in site speed and revenue, and it is where we usually start on a marketing engagement, because it is the fastest ranking gain available and the client controls every part of it. Get in touch if you want a site mapped.
References
- 23 Million Internal Links: SEO Case Study, Zyppy, Cyrus Shepard
- The SEO strategies Cyrus Shepard discovered after analysing 23 million internal links, Niche Pursuits
- SEO Starter Guide: link wisely, Google Search Central