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Creator economy · Search

Internal links are necessary and nowhere near sufficient

Measured on our own 349 guides: what clean internal linking bought us, and the two thirds of the site it did not rescue.

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Part of: For creators

What our own site looks like

And the distribution, which is more useful than any average:

The shape to aim for is that first row reading zero, and the second row being small. Ours is zero and seven, and it is zero because the site’s build refuses to publish a page without linking it from somewhere — not because anyone remembered.

That is the transferable point. Orphan pages are not a discipline problem, they are a process problem, and the fix is a step that happens automatically rather than a note in a checklist.

Why this is the lever creators actually hold

Almost everything that determines whether a page gets found is outside your control. Whether anyone links to you, how much crawl budget you are given, whether a platform decides your posts are indexable at all. Internal links are the exception: they are entirely yours, they cost nothing, and they are the only signal you can add this afternoon.

They do three separate things, and conflating them is why advice about them is so vague.

• Discovery. A crawler finds pages by following links. A page nothing links to is reachable only from the sitemap, and a sitemap is a suggestion. In our own inspection of 85 URLs on the same day, 27 sat in a submitted sitemap and were still unknown to Google.
• Priority. Which of your pages matter is something you communicate by how many of your own pages point at them. Nothing else you write says it.
• Readers. The one everybody forgets, and the only one that pays off on day one. A reader who finishes a page and finds the obvious next one has been served; a reader who finds nothing goes back to search.

And what it did not do

Here is the part that would be left out of a page written to sell you an internal-linking service.

We have 349 guide pages, zero orphans, a median of 5 inbound links each and 22 outbound links each. On the same day, a sample of our sitemap came back 40% indexed, 27% discovered but not crawled, 33% unknown to Google.

Clean internal linking did not get two thirds of our pages indexed. It is necessary — a page nothing links to has no route in at all — and it is nowhere near sufficient. Anyone telling you internal links are a ranking trick is describing a site that had other things going for it.

What internal linking genuinely buys a creator is that no page is unreachable, and that the pages you care about most are the ones your own site points at most. Both are worth having. Neither is a shortcut.

Building the structure, in the order that works

1. Group before you link. Decide the four or five topics you publish about. Links inside a topic are worth more to a reader than links across topics, and a crawler reads the same grouping.
2. Give each topic one page that lists the rest. Ours are hubs; a creator’s might be one page per category. This is the page you link from everywhere, so it should be the page you would send someone new to.
3. Link every new page from two existing ones, at publish time. Not later. Later is how orphans happen, and the fix costs ten times what the habit does.
4. Link forward as well as back. Older pages that never gain new links go stale in the structure even if the content is fine.
5. Use the destination’s real title as the anchor text. “Click here” tells a reader nothing and a crawler less.
6. Check for orphans on a schedule. Better still, make publishing without a link impossible, which is what we did after finding twelve dead internal links in one audit.

Five mistakes we have made ourselves

• Linking to pages that did not exist yet. Twelve live links on our own site pointed at guides nobody had written. Every one was a 404 for a reader and a wasted fetch for a crawler. There is now a check that refuses to publish a link to a page that does not exist.
• Counting the navigation as internal linking. Eight of our pages have 359 inbound links each. That is the nav bar, not editorial judgement, and averaging it in makes every number look healthier than it is.
• One-way hubs. Our topic hubs listed their members for two weeks before any member linked back. A hub that collects no links is a list, not a hub.
• Anchor text that promised more than the page delivered. When a link had to be repointed, the honest fix was rewriting the anchor text too, not keeping wording that described a page that no longer existed.
• Assuming more links is better. Twenty-two outbound internal links on a guide is already generous. Past some point you are diluting rather than directing, and we do not know where that point is — nor does anyone quoting a number for it.

Frequently asked

How many internal links should a page have?

We do not have a defensible number and neither does anyone quoting one. For reference, our guides carry a median of 22 outbound internal links and receive a median of 5. Both were chosen for readers rather than derived from evidence.

What is an orphan page?

A page no other page on the site links to. It is reachable only from a sitemap, and a sitemap is a suggestion rather than a route.

Do internal links get pages indexed?

They help discovery and they are not sufficient. Our site has zero orphans and, on the same day, 33% of a sitemap sample was still unknown to Google.

Should I count navigation links?

Separate them. Navigation links every page equally and so carries no information about which pages matter. Eight pages on our site have 359 inbound links each purely from the nav.

Is there a downside to linking too much?

For readers, yes — a page dense with links is harder to finish. For crawlers we have no measurement and will not repeat a threshold we cannot support.

Method and scope

• Measured 3 September 2026 across all 468 pages of our built site. Every href pointing at an internal path was extracted, de-duplicated per page, and self-links dropped.
• Inbound counts for guides exclude navigation, because navigation points at hubs rather than at guides. Hub inbound counts do include it, which is why they read 359.
• Indexation figures are from a 45-URL Search Console sample spread across our sitemap, taken the same day.
• Not measured: whether any of this changed a ranking. We have no before-and-after on a controlled change, and this page does not claim one.
• We have earned $0 in affiliate commission. These are our own structural numbers, published whichever way they read.

Last verified 3 September 2026 against all 468 pages of our own built site, parsed for internal links

How this guide was made. We research and draft these guides with AI, then a person checks every price, link and factual claim against the source before it publishes. We work this way because it lets us re-verify prices across hundreds of guides in a day, which is what keeps the numbers here current; it does not decide what we recommend. Anything we could not verify is labelled as unverified rather than filled in.