Anchor text
The visible, clickable text of a hyperlink, used by search engines as a description of the destination page.
LinksInternal links
Internal linking
Links between pages on the same site, which control crawl paths, distribute link equity, and communicate topical relationships and page importance.
In full
Internal links are the only link type you fully control, and on large sites they usually have more impact than any realistic external campaign. Effective work means reducing click depth to important pages, linking contextually within body content rather than only from navigation, using descriptive anchor text, and ensuring links are real `<a href>` elements crawlers can follow. Automated internal linking should be constrained by relevance rules or it produces noise.
Example
Adding contextual links from 40 informational articles to a commercial category page lifts its impressions substantially over a quarter.
Related terms
Link equity
The ranking value passed through a hyperlink, influenced by the linking page's own authority, its relevance, its number of outbound links…
Site architecture
How a site's URLs, navigation and internal links are organised into a hierarchy that users and crawlers can traverse efficiently.
Orphan page
A page with no internal links pointing to it, reachable only via sitemap, external link or direct URL.
Topic cluster
A content model where one broad pillar page links to and from many specific supporting pages covering subtopics of the same subject.
Where to read more
- Information Architecture for the World Wide Web · Book · openlibrary.org