Internal Links: SEO Best Practices for Internal Linking

Interlinking pages on your website packs a one-two punch: It helps customers navigate easily, and it helps search engine crawlers scan and index your pages. All told, this simple tactic helps both customers and search engines explore your site, improving visibility and content discovery.

Let’s explore what internal links are, how they improve search engine optimization (SEO), and best practices for using them to strengthen your website’s performance.

What are internal links?

Internal links are hyperlinks that connect to other pages on the same website. For instance, your homepage might include internal links pointing to product categories or collections, company information, blog posts, or a contact form.

“Internal links are the core of how people and bots can navigate your website,” said Shopify Senior SEO Specialist Arthur Camberlein. “And their limit might only be your inventiveness.”

There are several types of internal links to know about, which can appear on different parts of a website:

• Navigational links. These often appear in the top navigation bar, guiding users to key pages like product categories.
• Sidebar links. A subtype of navigational links, these appear in the sidebar and can change across the site, tailored to the page experience.
• Footer links. Located at the bottom of a page, these often point to important information not listed in the main navigation, such as contact information, career pages, and customer support.
• Breadcrumb links. Breadcrumbs show the user’s path, such as Shoes > Men’s shoes > Running shoes. They’re particularly useful for websites with deep structures, helping users navigate back through levels easily.
• Contextual links. These links point to related resources within your content, helping users and search engines understand connections between topics. For example, in a blog post about top running shoe styles, you might hyperlink “cross-training” to that product’s category page. 
• CTA links. Call-to-action links are buttons or highlighted elements that drive engagement (e.g., a banner linking to a sale or a box encouraging newsletter sign-ups).
• Anchor links. These act as a table of contents for long-form content, allowing readers to jump to sections on the same page.

Most internal links are automatically crawlable by search engines. 

How internal links improve SEO

• Site structure
• Crawling and indexing
• Page authority
• User experience

Internal links are important for SEO because they help search engines understand the purpose and importance of each page on your website. When crawlers can follow clear links between connected pages, they can better identify relevant content to display in search results. A solid internal linking strategy also communicates your overall site structure, allowing search engines to crawl, index, and rank your content more efficiently. 

The result isn’t just better visibility—it can also lead to higher rankings. In one seoClarity case study, a retail brand increased internal links to underperforming product pages after expanding its navigation. The result was that those pages reclaimed top ranking positions in Google search and saw a 23% rise in organic traffic.

Here’s how internal links impact site structure, crawling, authority, and user experience.

Site structure

Just like a brick-and-mortar store has a blueprint, your website has a sitemap—a map of all the key pages within your domain. Internal links act like directional signs, helping both visitors and search engines understand how those pages fit together.

Establishing clear site architecture by linking between pages gives Google context about the hierarchy of your website. For example, your homepage might include navigational links to product category pages, which then include contextual links to relevant content like blog posts. This structure helps Google recognize which pages are most important while also ensuring visitors can move through your site intuitively.

Crawling and indexing

For your webpages to rank, Google first needs to find them. Internal links make that process easier by guiding search engines as they crawl and index your site. 

This structure helps Google distinguish between different types of pages, such as your About Us page, product listings, and blog posts, so it can deliver the most relevant results to searchers. Pages without internal links (known as orphan pages) are often harder for Google to discover. 

When your site is well organized, search engine bots can efficiently reach and index more of your content, improving visibility across your domain. According to Google’s documentation, its crawler—known as Googlebot—discovers new pages through links on sites it has already scanned, so your internal link structure directly affects what content gets found and indexed.

Page authority

Another key benefit of your internal linking efforts is that it helps distribute authority throughout your site. Internal links improve both domain authority and topical authority. 

In practice, pages with more internal links pointing to them are viewed as more valuable. A page with high authority, like your homepage, can pass link equity (the value passed through links to pages) to other pages through these links. By connecting high-authority pages to lower-level ones, you can distribute ranking value across your site and help more pages perform well in search.

Internal linking also reinforces your site’s topical authority. Having many interlinked pages on a particular subject signals to Google (and customers) that you have a deep content library, with a lot to say on that subject.

User experience and conversion

A strong internal linking structure not only improves SEO but also enhances the user experience. Internal links help customers navigate your site more easily, boosting user engagement and encouraging them to explore more content on your site. On product pages, these links can point to helpful resources, such as FAQs or complementary products.

By directing visitors to related content they’ll find useful, you can reduce bounce rate (the percentage of viewers who leave after viewing only one page) and increase time on site. Linking to conversion-focused pages, such as an email sign-up form or pricing page, can also move shoppers closer to completing a purchase.

Best practices for internal linking

• Build your site structure
• Perform an internal link audit
• Link with context
• Avoid overoptimization
• Use nofollow links strategically

There are several ways to strengthen your internal linking strategy to boost traffic and engagement. Following these steps—and performing routine site maintenance—can help improve your search ranking and create more opportunities to convert visitors into customers.

Build your site structure

Before adding more internal links, map out your site’s structure. Think of it like a pyramid, with your homepage at the top and important supplemental pages, such as product categories, below it. This helps both you and Google understand how pages relate to one another and where links should connect.

Perform an internal link audit

Just as you’d inspect your brick-and-mortar store before a renovation or expansion, review your existing internal links to ensure they’re accurate, active, and point to the correct destinations. Broken links create a poor user experience and can hurt your site’s SEO value. 

SEO platforms like Semrush offer site audit features that help you identify and fix broken internal links across your website. Shopify users can also access hundreds of SEO apps through the ecommerce platform’s app store.

Link with context

Internal links work best when they connect content that naturally belongs together. Instead of linking just for hierarchy or keyword targeting, focus on relevance—how one page supports or deepens another. This approach improves both search visibility and user experience by helping search engines understand topical relationships while guiding readers to related information.

“I would not think about the category of pages, but focus more on context,” Arthur said. “For example, if you have a blog post talking about helmets, you should create links to several helmet products, product categories and subcategories, and to related accessories such as gloves.”

A good practice is to use exact match anchor text and ensure you have a content page that matches that title. For instance, if you have a listicle blog post titled “Best Running Shoes for Older Adults,” you can link to it with that exact text when referencing the topic elsewhere, such as in another blog post or from your running shoes product category page. 

Avoid overoptimization

Treat internal links like food seasoning—a little goes a long way. Overusing internal links can appear spammy to users and hurt your SEO. While there’s no strict rule for the number of internal links to include, a good guideline to aim for is roughly two to five per 1,000 words.

Avoid link schemes meant to game the system, such as anchor text that doesn’t match the destination. If you have an internal link on the term “backpacks,” for example, it should point to content about backpacks—not an unrelated page you’re trying to boost.

Use nofollow links strategically

Not every link on your site needs to influence search rankings. In some cases, you may want search engines to skip a page entirely. Adding a nofollow tag tells Google not to follow a specific link or use it to influence rankings. This can be useful for user-generated content, sponsored posts, login pages, or checkout flows. In these cases, you either don’t control the linked content, have paid for the link, or don’t need search engines to crawl those pages—so using a nofollow tag prevents passing ranking credit and keeps your site’s SEO focus on high-value pages.

To create a nofollow link, you just need to add rel=”nofollow” to the tag in the HTML for that page.