Why do internal links matter for SEO? Why should we optimize our site’s internal linking structure? Internal links are important because they connect one page on your website to another page. They are critical for SEO and GEO because they help guide search engine and AI bots through your site and this helps all those bots discover new content and also helps them understand the relationship between pages. Internal links are also one way of signaling which pages are the most valuable on your website. Presumably, the more links there are going to a page, the more valuable that page likely is.
Now, there are some technical issues that can disrupt how bots crawl your site and how users navigate it. So, in this video, I want to walk through some of the common internal link problems that you need to watch out for and talk about some of the things you can do if you start to see these problems on your website.
First problem that I see a lot of sites running into is orphan pages. So, an orphan page means that there’s an indexable page on your site, a page that you want to be included in search results that you want AI bots to use as part of training data, but that page has no internal links pointing to it. And this is a problem because those pages are basically cut off from the site’s structure. And if bots can’t find them via links, then they may not index those pages at all. Even if they do find the page, like there’s an external link pointing to that page or maybe there’s a listing in an XML sitemap, the lack of internal links signals to Google especially that the page is really unimportant and that makes it harder for that page to rank or earn citations.
You can sometimes see these pages showing up in Crawled, currently not indexed in Google Search Console. If you want to keep this page and you think that this page really matters for SEO and for GEO, then you want to go through and add relevant internal links to that orphaned page. And if you don’t want to keep the page, maybe it’s an old page that just kind of became orphaned because you no longer need that page, then just delete that page, get rid of it, and let that page return a 404 instead.
Another problem that’s similar to orphan pages is near-orphan pages. Near orphan pages are just what it sounds like. These are almost orphaned pages. They are indexable pages that we want ranking in search results that we want AI bots to find and use, but they have almost no internal links pointing to them. And while it’s not completely cut off from the rest of the site like an orphan page is, a near-orphan page has such a low link count that it suggests to search engine bots and AI bots that the content probably isn’t that critical and that can negatively impact rankings. It can negatively impact citations.
So the fix is the same as for orphan pages. If you really like this page, you want to keep this page as part of your site structure and you do want this page included in rankings and citations and AI responses, then you need to add links pointing to this page. Try and add as many relevant links as you can to that page on your website. If you look at the page and go, well, yeah, this page is near orphaned, but you know what? I don’t really need it. It’s an old page. It’s outdated.
Then same thing here. Just delete the page. and then also remove the few internal links that do exist pointing to that page. Another problem that can happen with internal links are broken internal links. So broken internal links are links that point to pages that do not exist. So these are pages that return 404s or 410s and they create a dead end for users and also cause bots to waste crawl budget on error pages instead of actually crawling valid content. We don’t want Google and OpenAI and Bing crawling 404 errors on our site, right? We want them crawling actual working pages on our site instead. So, the fix is to remove the broken links or update the internal link to go to a working page on your website.
The next problem is internal links that redirect. Internal links that redirect are links that when you click on them, you click on a URL, but that URL redirects to another URL. So for example, you might be linking to page A, but page A then redirects to page B. Instead, you want the link going directly to page B. This is a problem because bots have to process the redirects multiple steps. They have to process page A and then they have to process the redirect and then they have to load page B.
That slows things down. It wastes resources. It wastes crawl budget. This can become a bigger problem if you redirect in chains. So it’s page A to page B to page C to page D and then page D loads. That’s an even longer process bots have to go through and humans do too. Browsers have to execute all those redirects as well and that can create problems with speed for humans as well as for bots. The fix here is to update the internal links so that way they do not point to a redirect. you want to update that internal link to go directly to the final destination.
Another problem that I see come up with internal links are irrelevant links. This is where links to a page have no topical relationship to the source content. Often these are links that are just added to increase link counts. For example, page A links to page B, but page A really has nothing to do with page B. you’re just adding that link to try and maybe boost the link counts to that page. This is a problem both for users coming to your website and bots coming to your website. Bots are going to use the internal links to understand the site structure and the relationship between pages.
And so an irrelevant link causes the bot to be maybe a little bit confused about how these two pages are related. Google might actually see this as a type of spam or like you’re trying to be manipulative within your site structure and you definitely don’t want that to happen. But visitors coming to your website are probably going to be confused as well. If they click on that link, why am I going to this page? Has nothing to do with what I was just reading over here. The fix is pretty simple. You want to remove any irrelevant links that exist within your website.
What’s harder about fixing this is actually going through and finding any irrelevant links. I find that this is best to do as you’re updating content or maybe doing a bigger content review on your website. Start checking for irrelevant links at that point and either remove that irrelevant link altogether or replace it with a link that is actually related to the source content.
The last problem I want to talk about in this video is using the wrong kind of HTML tags for your links. So, broadly speaking, there are a few different ways you can link people from one page of your website to another. The most common way to do this is with an A tag. And that a tag contains an href attribute. And that href attribute contains the URL that you’re linking to.
But the other methods that you can use are things like a button tag. So a button tag has an onclick event and that onclick event uses JavaScript to send people from one page to another. You can also use onclick events in other HTML tags as well. The problem is is that bots generally do not trigger click events like humans do. If a link is hidden behind an onclick event or uses a button, that bot may never see it. They may never follow that link.
So, if a bot is supposed to find a page, you want to make sure you’re linking to it with an A tag and have that URL in the href attribute. That way, by using the correct HTML tag, you can ensure that bots are going to be able to find the internal links going to that page. The main takeaway from all of this is you want to regularly audit your internal links and you want to check for these kinds of problems. You want to make sure that your important content is linked to in a way that bots can crawl it, that they can crawl it from relevant pages, and also make sure that you aren’t sending bots to dead ends with broken pages or making them go through a bunch of redirects that are really inefficient.
If you have any questions about building out your site’s internal link structure or need help auditing your site’s internal link structure, please let me know. My email address is matthewelementive.com. If you liked this video and would like to see more like it from Elementive, please subscribe. Thank you for watching.