The SEO Guide to Internal Links

The red arrow is pointing to the internal link.

The source page of this https://keywordspeopleuse.com and it is pointing to the destination page at https://keywordspeopleuse.com/buy-credits.

The link uses the anchor text “Buy clustering credits”.

If we look at the HTML source code we will see that it looks like this:

<a href=”https://keywordspeopleuse.com/buy-credits”>Buy clustering credits</a>

So we can see that this link has no additional relationship information with it, so this link will pass PageRank from the page it’s on to the page it links to, so this means it’s good for SEO, links like this are often known as “dofollow” or “followed” links.

The link could have been tagged with the relationship attributes using the rel= tag:

<a rel=”sponsored” href=”https://keywordspeopleuse.com/buy-credits”>Buy clustering credits</a>

would tell Google this is a sponsored link, which would be very unusual for an internal link as it is usually seen on backlinks from external sites where you are declaring a commercial interest between two websites. Presumably it might be used if you had some pages hosted on your site which someone was paying you to produce and you wanted to declare this to Google. Google wouldn’t use this link for ranking purposes, so no SEO benefit to the internal page you linked to.

<a rel=”ugc” href=”https://keywordspeopleuse.com/buy-credits”>Buy clustering credits</a> would tell Google this is a link placed in user generated content, so the author of the page can’t necessarily vouch for the link. As with sponsored links this might be unusual to see on an internal link, but it could happen if you automatically tagged all user generated content links with the ugc attribute. Google might use this link for ranking purposes, so there may be some SEO benefit, but not guaranteed.

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”https://keywordspeopleuse.com/buy-credits”>Buy clustering credits</a> would tell Google this is a link where the author of the linking page (for whatever reason) does not want to endorse the page being linked to for ranking purposes. Google will usually respect this directive and not pass any SEO ranking benefit. Using nofollow for internal links was at one time quite common with a technique called PageRank sculpting where the aim was to not dilute PageRank to minor pages such as “about us” type pages and only direct PageRank to pages you wanted to rank well. However, Google a long time ago said they had changed the way nofollow was treated to prevent page rank sculpting.

In general I’d just recommend having all your internal links as dofollow links and not try to confuse things by adding relationship attributes.

Why do Internal links matter for SEO?

Internal links are an important part of SEO for a few very good reasons.

Anchor text

You control and place your own internal links and they allow you to create very relevant anchor text for each link. Google uses the anchor text of links to help it work out what the content of the linked to page is about and any keywords used in the anchor text will help the page rank for those keywords.

Always use good descriptive anchor text for your internal links.

Page importance

The most important page on most websites is your homepage as that is the page on your site that tends to receive the most backlinks over time so will be the page on your site with the most PageRank.

Therefore you can signal to Google what the most important pages are on your website by internal linking to them from your homepage and thus pass them the most PageRank.

Page Hierarchy

A good page hierarchy can be signaled to Google from your internal links, especially if you use a well designed navigation and features such as breadcrumb links. This helps Google determine the relationship between pages.

Crawlability

Good internal linking will help Google crawl the entirety of your site and see the relationship between pages and sections of your site.