Internal linking, defined

Terms

Anchor text

The visible words of a link. Search engines use them as a description of the destination; readers use them to decide whether to click. Descriptive beats generic, and natural beats repeated.

Crawl depth

The minimum number of clicks from the homepage to a page, following plain links. Pages at depth five or more are crawled less often and are usually a sign that a hub is missing.

Orphan page

A page with no internal links pointing to it. It may be in the sitemap and still be an orphan. Crawlers may find it; nothing tells them it matters.

Hub page

A page whose job is to explain one subject fully and to link out to everything that supports it. Service pages are hubs for what you sell; topic indexes are hubs for what you know.

Link equity

An informal term for the ranking signal a link passes from one page to another. Internal links pass it too, which is why the pages you link to most are the pages you are telling search engines to rank.

Navigational link

A link in a menu, footer or sidebar that appears on every page. Useful for people, weak as a signal because it is identical everywhere.

Contextual link

A link inside body copy, surrounded by text about the destination. The strongest kind of internal link because it carries meaning as well as a path.

Breadcrumb

A line of links showing the page’s position in the site’s folder structure. Helps readers orient and can be marked up so search results display the path.