How to add at least three internal links per page
At least three internal links on each page let crawlers and AI assistants discover related content and understand how your site is organized. Add contextual links inside the body text with descriptive anchor text, and keep your navigation links as well.
By ratemysite.ai editorial team. Updated .
How do you fix it?
- List 3 to 5 pages on your site that are genuinely related to the page you are editing.
- Add links to them inside the body text, at the moment the topic comes up, using standard <a href> tags.
- Write descriptive anchor text such as "our guide to canonical tags" and avoid "click here".
- Add a short related reading list at the end of long pages, and link back from older pages to new ones.
- Re-run the audit and confirm the Internal links check passes.
What is an internal link?
An internal link is a hyperlink from one page of your site to another page on the same site. Crawlers follow them to discover pages, and the anchor text tells them what the target is about. A page that no other page links to is called an orphan, and search engines often miss it or treat it as unimportant. Take a site with 120 product pages: if 30 of them are linked only from the sitemap, those 30 are orphans that crawlers reach less often.
Where should internal links go?
Place them where they help the reader decide the next step. A guide on meta descriptions should link to the title tag guide and the snippet guide. Prefer links in the main text over footer link lists, which carry less meaning. Use real anchor tags with an href, because links triggered only by JavaScript click handlers may not be followed. Review your top 10 pages every quarter and link them to the newest relevant content.
How much does this check matter?
- This check is worth about 1% of the overall score.
- A finished report is reused for 24 hours before you can re-analyze it.
- Each page is fetched with a timeout of 10 seconds, and HTML larger than 2 MB is not audited.
What else do people ask?
- Do internal links help ranking?
- Yes. They pass authority between your pages and show which pages matter most. Pages with no internal links are hard for crawlers to find.
- Is there a maximum number of internal links?
- There is no fixed limit. Keep links useful and relevant; hundreds of links on one page dilute each one and read as clutter.