What are the main types of internal links?

Short answer

Two main types. Navigational links, in menus, footers and sidebars, appear on every page and give the site its structure. Contextual links, inside the body text, connect specific pages to each other with descriptive anchors. Navigational links tell Google what exists. Contextual links tell it what matters and what each page is about, and they are the ones most sites lack.

Internal links get sorted into all sorts of categories in SEO articles: navigational, contextual, footer, sidebar, breadcrumb, image, hierarchical. For practical purposes, two types do almost all the work, and understanding the difference between them explains why so many sites underperform.

Navigational links

These are the links in your header menu, footer, sidebar and breadcrumbs. They appear on every page, or on every page of a section, and their job is structure. They let people get around, and they make sure Google can reach your main sections from anywhere.

Because they repeat everywhere, they say little about any individual page. A link in the menu to your services page sits on every page of the site, so Google learns that the page exists and is part of the main structure, but very little about which content on your site relates to it or what in particular it is about. A menu link tells Google nothing it could not already assume.

Navigational links still matter. A page left out of the menu and the footer, and linked from nowhere else, can become an orphan. But they are the foundation, not the strategy.

Contextual links

These are links inside the main body of a page, in a sentence that is talking about the destination. “If your Business Profile category is wrong, fixing the primary category is usually the quickest win.” The surrounding text and the anchor describe the target precisely.

That is why they carry more weight. Google’s link guidance says good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it’s on. A contextual link in a relevant sentence meets all three in a way a menu label cannot. And because contextual links are chosen page by page, they show which pages your site considers related and important.

On most sites I audit, the contextual links are where the gap is. The pages that sell are reachable from the menu and nowhere else, while the blog links to itself in circles. Moving a few dozen contextual links to point at the right pages is often the fastest ranking improvement available.

Other types worth knowing

Breadcrumbs. A trail like Home, Services, Local SEO at the top of a page. Structural, helpful for people, and a clean way to link each page up to its parent.
Related content blocks. “You might also like” lists, usually generated by a plugin. Better than nothing, but they link by tag or similarity rather than by what needs support, and they read as boilerplate.
Image links. A linked image uses its alt text as the anchor. Make sure the alt text describes the destination.
Pagination links. Page 2, 3 and so on in a series. Necessary for crawling long lists. Each paginated page should have its own canonical, not point back to page one.

Why links built with JavaScript can fail

Whatever the type, a link only works for search if Google can follow it. Google’s documentation says it can generally only crawl links that are anchor elements with an href attribute. Buttons that navigate with a click handler, or menus that only appear after scripts run, may look like links to a person and not be links to Google. I check for this on every JavaScript-heavy site, because it can leave entire sections unreachable.

How the types work together

Navigational links give every page a minimum level of access. Contextual links decide which pages get the most support and what they are understood to be about. A healthy site has a sensible menu that does not try to link to everything, and a body of content that links generously and deliberately to the pages that need help.

If you only fix one thing, fix the contextual links into your money pages. If you fix two, add breadcrumbs too.

A quick way to see the balance on your site

Pick an important service or category page. Use a crawler to list every internal link pointing at it. Count how many come from the menu or footer and how many come from a sentence in another page’s content. If almost all of them are navigational, that page is relying on structure alone and has room to grow.

Anchor text across all types

Whichever type of link it is, the words matter. The HTTP Archive’s 2025 analysis found 86.6% of pages passed the check for descriptive link text, which means more than one page in eight still relies on anchors like “click here” or “read more” somewhere. Those anchors waste the one place you get to tell Google, in a few words, what the next page is about. Fixing them is quick, and on a large site it is often a template change rather than a page-by-page job.

If your important pages are linked from the menu and nowhere else, my internal linking service adds the contextual links your copy is already asking for, with anchors chosen from your own Search Console data.