I went back through eleven audits I’ve written since 2021. Local clinics, a Shopify homeware store, a classic car marketplace, three continuing-education platforms, an ad agency, a car parts retailer.
Different platforms. Different sizes. One had 189 pages, another had over nine thousand. Different budgets, different industries, different countries.
Every one of them had a problem with internal linking. Eleven out of eleven.
Nothing else came close. Schema was missing on ten. Thin content on ten. After that it drops away quickly.
I didn’t expect the number to be that clean, and I’ll be honest that it made me slightly uncomfortable when I counted it. Eleven out of eleven is the kind of statistic that usually means the person counting has defined the thing too loosely.
So I went back and looked at what I’d actually written in each one. They were not the same finding. That’s the part worth your time.
It is never the same problem twice
“Internal linking is weak” is what ends up in the audit document. Underneath it, these were eight genuinely different failures.
1. The money page with no internal links at all.
A med spa’s main service page, the treatment the business is built on, had not one internal link on it. Not to a related service, not back to the home page, not to a booking page. It sat there as a dead end.
That page was expected to rank. Nothing on the site was telling Google it mattered, and nothing on the site gave a visitor anywhere to go once they’d read it.
2. The URL as the anchor text.
Two of the three local sites I audited this year did this throughout their blog. Links written as https://example.com/services/thing/ rather than as words.
The link still passes. It just says nothing. Anchor text is one of the few places you get to tell Google, in plain language, what the destination page is about, and it costs nothing to use. Writing the URL instead is leaving a free field blank.
The automated checks will not save you here. HTTP Archive’s 2025 Web Almanac found 86.6% of mobile home pages pass Lighthouse’s descriptive-link-text audit, which sounds like a solved problem. It is not. That audit catches “click here” and “read more”. It does not flag a raw URL used as anchor text, and it has nothing at all to say about a page whose only links are the ones in the menu. Nine sites in ten pass a test that was never measuring the thing that is wrong with them.
3. Menu links only, never contextual.
This is the most common version by a distance. The home page links to the service pages, but only through the navigation.
Every page on the site has that navigation. It’s there on the privacy policy. A link from the menu tells Google approximately nothing about the relationship between this page and that one, because the relationship is identical everywhere.
A link from inside the body copy is different. Somebody chose to put it there, in that sentence, with those words around it.
There is a pattern in the aggregate data worth knowing about. In the 2024 Web Almanac, the median page across the whole web carried 41 internal links. On the top thousand sites by traffic, the median was 129. Three times as many.
I would not read that as cause and effect — large sites have more pages to link to, and they got large for reasons that have nothing to do with linking. But hold it next to the eleven audits and the shape is the same one. The sites at the top are doing a great deal of this. The sites I get called into are doing almost none of it, and nothing except attention is stopping them.
4. Two links to the same page, none to the others.
One clinic’s home page linked to the same service page twice, from two different sections, and to three other service pages not at all.
Nobody decided that. It’s what happens when a page is assembled from blocks over two years by three different people. But the effect is a home page arguing hard for one service and staying silent about the rest.
5. Blog posts that only link to other blog posts.
The blog links to the blog. Post to post to post, a closed circuit.
Meanwhile the pages that actually sell something, the service pages and the collection pages, receive nothing. The blog is doing work and putting it in a cul-de-sac. I found this on both the med spa and one of the clinics.
6. The About page that links only to Contact.
A single internal link on one of the most-visited pages on the site, and it goes to the page a visitor was probably going to find anyway.
7. Orphan pages, at scale.
The extreme end. A classic car marketplace with 8,317 pages that nothing on the site linked to, out of roughly 9,220 indexed. A car parts retailer with 1,277.
At that point you’re not talking about weak internal linking. You’re talking about most of the site being unreachable. I’ve written that one up separately because the cause is different. It’s a database problem, not an editorial one.
8. Too many links.
Worth including because it’s the one people don’t expect. An agency site where every page and post carried a large number of internal and external links in the sidebar.
More links is not better. A page that links to forty things is not emphasising any of them.
Why this one keeps winning
There’s a practical reason internal linking is the finding I write most often, and it isn’t that it’s the most damaging problem. It usually isn’t. A site blocked in robots.txt has a worse day than a site with lazy anchor text.
It’s that internal linking is the only significant ranking input that is entirely inside the building.
Everything else needs somebody else’s cooperation. Links need other people to link to you. Content needs a writer, a brief, a budget and a month. Speed needs a developer. Schema needs somebody who can edit the theme.
Internal links need you to open the page and add a sentence.
That’s the whole argument for calling it the cheapest link building there is. Not that an internal link is worth as much as an external one, because it isn’t, but that you can do a hundred of them in an afternoon, for nothing, without asking permission from anybody outside the company.
Which raises the obvious question: if it’s that cheap, why is it broken on eleven sites out of eleven?
Because nobody owns it
In fifteen years I have never once seen internal linking on somebody’s job description.
The developer builds the template. The writer writes the post. The designer decides where the buttons go. The SEO agency is looking at rankings and backlinks. Internal linking is the thing that emerges from all four of them not talking to each other, and it degrades quietly.
It also never breaks visibly. A missing H1 shows up in every crawler. A 404 sends an alert. A page with no internal links looks completely normal. It renders, it loads, it converts if somebody lands on it. There is no red flag anywhere, ever, until somebody sits down and looks.
What I’d actually do, in order
Not a project. An afternoon.
Crawl the site and pull the orphan list first. Sitebulb and Screaming Frog both report this. If the number is large, stop reading this and go find out what’s generating those pages. You have a different problem.
Then find your five most important pages and ask what links to each of them. Not “is it in the menu”, but what body-copy link, on what page, with what anchor text. On most sites the answer for at least one of the five is nothing.
Then fix the home page. Contextual links, in the copy, to every service or category that matters, with anchor text that says what the page is. If a service is worth having a page for, it’s worth a sentence on the home page.
Then point the blog at the money pages. Every post should link to at least one page that sells something, in the body, with descriptive anchor text. If a post can’t do that naturally, that tells you something about why the post exists.
Then look at what the menus are promoting. The header and footer are on every page, so whatever is in them is getting the site-wide vote. If the footer has thirty links and four of them matter, the other twenty-six are diluting the four.
Then leave it alone and measure. Internal linking is slow and undramatic. If you change it and rankings move the same week, something else moved.
What it won’t do
I’d rather say this than have you find out in six weeks.
Internal linking will not rescue a site with no authority. If the whole domain has thirty referring domains and the competitors have three thousand, rearranging the links inside your own house is not the constraint. In one of these eleven audits the client had 671 referring domains and the market leader had 29,812. No amount of internal linking closes that.
What internal linking does is make sure the authority you do have lands on the pages you want to rank, rather than being spread evenly across everything you’ve ever published. On most sites that is a meaningful gain and it is available immediately.
It is not a substitute for having something worth linking to.
The short version
- It was in every one of eleven audits. Nothing else was.
- It’s never the same problem twice: no links at all, URLs as anchors, menu-only, duplicates, blog-to-blog loops, orphans, or simply too many.
- It’s the cheapest thing on the list because it needs nobody’s permission.
- It’s broken everywhere because nobody owns it, and it never fails visibly.
- Orphans first, then the five pages that matter, then the home page, then the blog, then the menus.
- It won’t fix an authority problem. It makes the authority you have land where you want it.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. Link building covers the off-site half. If you’re not sure which of several plausible problems is the one costing you, that’s what an SEO audit is for.
