Internal linking is the practice of creating hyperlinks between pages within the same website. Unlike external links that point to other domains, internal links connect your own URLs to one another — forming the navigational architecture that both search engine crawlers and human visitors use to move through a site.
Internal links serve three interconnected functions. For crawlers, they are the primary mechanism by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages: a page with no internal links pointing to it (an orphan page) is at risk of never being crawled or indexed. For link equity, they distribute ranking authority from high-authority pages (such as a popular homepage or well-linked hub article) to deeper pages that might not attract many external backlinks on their own. For readers, contextual internal links surface related content mid-article, reducing the need to return to search results and increasing time on site.
Anchor text discipline matters: the visible text of an internal link is a relevance signal about the destination page. Links with descriptive, varied anchor text pass clearer signals than those using generic phrases like "click here" or "read more." The internal linking structure of a well-built site reflects a hub-and-spoke architecture: pillar pages on broad topics link to and receive links from cluster pages on specific sub-topics, concentrating authority and signalling topical depth to search engines.