External links need someone else’s permission. Internal links are yours: which pages get authority, which get found, and what Google’s told each page is about, all decided by you, changeable this afternoon, free. For most sites they’re the highest-return work available, and they’re usually a mess.
Why internal links move rankings
Three mechanisms, all documented territory. Discovery: Google finds URLs mainly by following links, so your linking decides what gets crawled at all (see crawling and indexing). Authority flow: PageRank still runs through internal links; pages linked often and from strong pages inherit standing. Meaning: anchor text and surrounding context tell Google what the destination is about, in your own words, at scale.
Hub and spoke, using this site as the diagram
Masters of SEO runs the structure I’m describing. The update history is a hub; guides like what is a core update and recovery are its spokes. Spokes link up to the hub, the hub links down to every spoke, and siblings link across where a reader would actually benefit. Authority pools around the hub, and every new spoke strengthens the cluster it joins instead of landing orphaned.
Anchor text without overdoing it
- Describe the destination plainly: ‘guide to crawl budget’ beats both ‘click here’ and a stuffed exact-match phrase repeated 40 times sitewide.
- Vary naturally by context. Sentences differ, so anchors will too if you write links into prose rather than pasting them.
- One rule I hold firmly: link where a reader would want to go next. Google’s guidance on links says much the same, and it conveniently produces the variety that looks natural, because it is.
The 2 failure modes: orphans and dilution
Orphans are pages with no internal links pointing at them: invisible to crawling via your site, and flagged as expendable by your own structure. Any crawler (Screaming Frog and friends) lists them; so does comparing your sitemap against a crawl. Dilution is the opposite vice: 300 links in mega-menus and footers on every page, telling Google everything matters equally, which reads as nothing mattering much. Trim sitewide links to what genuinely deserves sitewide status and let contextual links in body copy carry the signal.
The process to run after every publish
- Add 3 to 5 contextual links from the new page: up to its hub, across to its closest siblings.
- Find the 3 to 5 existing pages most related to the new one and link from them to it. Search
site:yourdomain.com topicor your own search box to find them. - Check the new page is within 3 clicks of the homepage.
- Quarterly: crawl for orphans, broken internal links and redirect chains, and fix what’s accumulated.
Sources
Google’s SEO starter guide and links guidance cover crawlability and anchor text. The hub-and-spoke method and the post-publish checklist are my practice, refined across client sites for years.