Internal Linking

When one page links to another on the same domain, it passes along a share of authority and tells crawlers the two pages are related. Search engines follow these links to discover new URLs, to work out how often a page is worth recrawling, and to infer what each page is about from the words used in the link. Pages with no internal links pointing at them, often called orphans, are hard to find and tend to rank poorly no matter how good they are, so a page that earns external links can lift the pages it links to in turn. Internal linking is one of the few ranking levers you control completely, because you own every page on both ends of the link.

The clearest way to use it at scale is a pillar-and-cluster structure: one broad pillar page on a topic links down to several narrower cluster pages, and each cluster page links back up to the pillar and across to its siblings. This gives crawlers a tidy map of how your content fits together and concentrates relevance around the topic you want to rank for. Anchor text matters here, because the words inside the link are a strong hint about the destination, so descriptive phrasing beats generic wording like "click here".

Consider a Shopify store selling running shoes. The collection page for trail shoes is the natural pillar. From the product page for a specific trail shoe, you link back to that collection, sideways to a comparison of two popular models, and out to a guide on choosing the right lug depth. The guide, in turn, links to the trail collection and to a sizing article. A shopper who lands on the guide from organic search now has a clear path toward a product, and a crawler sees a coherent cluster rather than five stranded pages.

This structure also helps with AI search and answer engines. Tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews tend to cite pages they can reach, parse, and place in context. Clear internal links and honest anchor text make the relationship between a buying guide and the products it discusses legible to a model, which raises the chance the right page is retrieved and quoted when someone asks a question your catalogue answers. Linking your supporting content to the pages you actually want surfaced is a quiet way to steer which page gets named.

The honest caveat is that more links are not always better. Stuffing a page with dozens of internal links dilutes the value each one carries and can read as manipulative, so favour links that are genuinely useful to the reader, keep anchor text descriptive and varied, and fix orphaned pages before adding decorative ones. Treat internal linking as ongoing maintenance rather than a one-off task, because every new page you publish is a chance to point old pages at it and to point it at the rest of your site.