Core+ Links Blog

Site structure and topic clusters

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every internal link you place adds to a larger shape: the structure of your site. Individual links help a reader move from one page to the next, but taken together they decide how your whole site is organised, how quickly any page can be reached, and how clearly a search engine can understand what you cover.

This article is about that larger shape — hierarchy, topic clusters, and pillar pages — and how to plan one that holds up as a site grows. It is one part of the complete guide to internal linking for SEO.

What site structure is

Site structure is how your pages relate to one another through links and hierarchy. The most useful way to picture it is by click depth: how many clicks it takes to reach a page from the home page.

A shallow structure keeps important pages within about three clicks of the home page. A deep structure buries them further down. Shallow is better for two reasons: readers reach your key content quickly, and search engines discover and re-crawl pages near the top more readily than pages buried deep. Depth is where pages get forgotten.

The hierarchical model

The most common structure is a hierarchy, often drawn as a pyramid. The home page sits at the top. Beneath it are broad category or pillar pages. Beneath those are individual posts and product pages. Links flow down the hierarchy and back up it.

Links flow down the hierarchy and back up it, keeping the structure shallow.

This shape does two things at once. It keeps the structure shallow, and it makes the relationships between pages legible — a search engine can see that a post belongs to a category, and that the category is a major section of the site. This is the same idea behind the authority that flows through a site, covered in how link equity flows through a site: a clean hierarchy lets value reach the pages that matter.

Topic clusters and pillar pages

A topic cluster is a way of organising content around a subject. It has two parts:

A pillar page covers a broad topic at a high level. This guide’s parent, the complete guide to internal linking for SEO, is a pillar page.
Cluster pages each cover one part of that topic in depth — anchor text, link equity, orphan pages, and so on.

The pillar links down to each cluster page, and each cluster page links back up to the pillar. That reciprocal linking is what makes it a cluster rather than a list. It signals to a search engine that you cover the topic comprehensively, and it gives a reader a coherent path through it.

The pillar links down to each cluster page, and each links back up.

Silos and clusters

Two terms describe related but distinct ideas, and they are often confused.

A silo is about URL and folder structure — grouping related pages under a shared path, such as /seo/, /seo/keyword-research/, and /seo/link-building/. It organises pages by address.

A topic cluster is about the linking network — which pages link to which, regardless of their URL path. It organises pages by relationship.

You do not have to choose. Most well-structured sites use a clean URL structure and a cluster linking model together. What is worth avoiding is a strict silo that forbids linking between sections: walling off your content means related pages never link to each other, and you lose both the reader’s path and the authority that would have flowed across. Use structure to organise, and let relevant links cross section boundaries where they genuinely help.

How to plan your structure

You do not need to rebuild a site to improve its structure. A few steps cover most of the work.

Map your topics. Group your existing content by subject. The groups are your candidate clusters.

Identify or create a pillar for each. For each group, decide which page is the broad, definitive one — or write it if it does not exist yet.

Link the cluster together. Point each cluster page up to its pillar, and the pillar down to each cluster page. Use descriptive anchor text on every one, so the links describe the relationships as well as create them.

Keep it shallow. Make sure important pages are reachable in a few clicks, and that nothing significant is stranded deep in the structure.

Use taxonomy deliberately. In WordPress, categories and tags are structure. Filing posts under coherent categories and meaningful tags helps both readers and search engines see how your content relates — provided the taxonomy reflects real topics rather than an uncontrolled sprawl of tags.

Common structural mistakes

A few patterns undo good structure, and they are worth watching for.

Flat everything. A site where every page hangs directly off the home page has no hierarchy for a search engine to read, and no way to signal which pages are the important ones. Some structure is better than none.

Orphaned sections. A whole cluster can end up disconnected if its pillar is never linked from anywhere prominent. Finding these is the job of how to find and fix orphan pages.

Structure by navigation alone. If a page is reachable only through a menu or a sidebar widget, it loses its place in the structure the moment that template changes. Body links in your content are what hold a structure together over time.

Over-tagging. Creating a new tag for every post produces dozens of thin archive pages that dilute the site rather than organise it. Keep the taxonomy small and meaningful.

Checking whether your structure actually holds — whether pages are orphaned, underlinked, or buried too deep — is the work of a full internal link audit.

Site structure in Core+ Links

Structure is central to how Core+ Links ranks internal link candidates. The heaviest of the eight ranking signals is taxonomy overlap, weighted at 0.30 — shared categories and tags — because two posts you have filed under the same category are strong evidence of a real relationship, stronger than shared words alone. A second signal, link-graph relevance, accounts for where a page already sits in your structure.

In other words, the tool reads the structure you have built and ranks suggestions in light of it, rather than treating every page as an isolated bag of words. It runs on your own WordPress install, deterministically, and sends nothing off-site.

Try it on your own site — download Core+ Links Free.

How to find and fix orphan pages

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Some of your best pages may be invisible to the rest of your own site. Not deleted, not hidden from search — published, indexable, and linked from nothing. These are orphan pages, and most sites of any age have more of them than their owners expect.

A page nothing links to is harder for a reader to reach and slower for a search engine to discover and re-crawl. It also receives no link equity, because there is no internal link to carry any. That is the whole of the problem, and it is enough of one to be worth solving.

This article covers what an orphan page is, why orphans accumulate, how to find them, and how to decide which are worth fixing. For the wider context, see the complete guide to internal linking for SEO.

What an orphan page is

An orphan page is an indexed page with no internal links pointing to it from anywhere else on your site. Within the site, nothing leads to it.

Three things it is often confused with, and is not:

An orphan is not a noindexed page. A noindexed page is one you have deliberately kept out of search. An orphan is usually a page you want found and forgot to link. The two problems are opposites — one is intentional exclusion, the other is accidental neglect.

An orphan is not necessarily low quality. Often it is the reverse. Substantial older posts orphan easily, because the newer writing that should point back to them was written without them in mind.

Reachable from the sitemap is not the same as linked internally. An XML sitemap helps a search engine discover a page, but it gives the page none of the context that an internal link carries — the surrounding topic, the descriptive anchor, the relationship to the rest of your work. A page can sit in the sitemap and still be orphaned.

Why orphan pages happen

Orphans are rarely created on purpose. They accumulate through ordinary site activity, and most sites collect them the same handful of ways.

Publishing order. A post goes up before the related posts that would naturally link to it exist. Nothing links to it at the time, and nothing goes back to add the link once the related posts arrive.

Removed navigation or widgets. A page linked only from a menu, a sidebar, or a “related posts” block is orphaned the moment that block changes. The link was never in the body of any page, so nothing in the content preserved it.

Site migrations and redesigns. URLs move, and not every link is updated to match. Pages that were well connected on the old structure fall out of the new one.

Deleted or restructured archives. Category and tag archives quietly do a lot of internal linking. Prune or reorganise them and the posts they held can lose their only inbound links.

Imported or bulk-created content. Pages added outside the normal editorial flow — imports, migrations, programmatic pages — rarely get linked into the site the way a hand-written post does.

How to find orphan pages

Start with the one fact that makes orphans harder to find than they sound: a crawler cannot find them on its own.

A crawler discovers pages by following links. An orphan has no inbound links, so a crawl never reaches it — the page is invisible to the exact tool most people reach for first. Finding orphans always means comparing every page that exists against every page the crawl reached. The difference between those two sets is your orphan list.

There are four practical ways to get there.

Crawl, then cross-reference against a full URL list. Export every published URL from your CMS or your XML sitemap, crawl the site to see which pages the internal links actually reach, and subtract the crawled set from the full set. What remains is orphaned.

Google Search Console. Pages that are indexed but draw almost no impressions, or that sit under “Discovered — currently not indexed”, are worth checking for inbound internal links. Search Console will not label them as orphans, but it points you at the candidates.

Your CMS’s own data. Some platforms can report how many internal links point to each page. Anything sitting at zero is, by definition, an orphan.

A tool that indexes all your content and reports orphans directly. This removes the manual cross-reference: hold the full set of pages and the full set of links in one index, and the orphans fall out without a crawl-and-subtract.

One step comes before you read any orphan list: exclude your utility pages first. A privacy policy, terms page, cookie notice, and thank-you page are all legitimately orphaned, and none of that is worth fixing. Left in the list, they bury the orphans that matter under pages that are working exactly as intended.

How to fix orphan pages

Fixing orphans is not automatic, and it should not be. Each page is a decision, and there are three possible answers.

Link it. If the page should be found, add internal links to it from relevant existing posts — the older, related articles a reader on this topic would expect to lead here. This is the right answer for most orphaned content.

Redirect or merge it. If the page duplicates or has been superseded by another, redirect it and fold anything worth keeping into the page that replaces it. An orphan that should not exist is not a linking problem.

Leave it. If it is a utility page or one you intentionally keep unlinked, an orphan is the correct state. Not every orphan is a mistake.

When the answer is link it, link it well. Add the links from genuinely relevant posts rather than the nearest handful. Use descriptive anchor text that names the destination, so a reader knows where the link goes before clicking. Prefer links in the body of your content over another sidebar block — a body link survives the next redesign, and a widget link is how the page was orphaned in the first place.

Then re-check. A page stops being an orphan the moment one relevant internal link points to it; confirm it has left the list on your next pass.

One honest note to close on. Finding an orphan and linking it makes the page reachable and gives it context within your site. Whether that changes a ranking is not something anyone can promise, and it is not the reason to do it. The reason is that a page worth publishing is worth being able to find.

Finding orphans continuously with Core+ Links

The manual cross-reference in the first method — export everything, crawl, subtract — is the part that does not scale as a site grows. It is the part Core+ Links indexes your site to remove.

It indexes your published posts and pages and produces the orphan pages report directly. There is no crawl-and-subtract, because the index already holds the full set of pages and the full set of links at once. You can exclude utility pages from indexing up front, and because exclusion is total and bidirectional, those pages never appear in the report to be waved off.

Excluded pages are never suggested as a target and never appear in the orphan report.

The index runs entirely on your own WordPress install. It is deterministic — the same content and settings produce the same report every time — and it sends nothing off your server.

For orphans as one part of a wider review, this pairs with a full internal link audit, which also covers underlinked pages, anchor quality, and link depth.

Try it on your own site — download Core Plus Links Free.

What an internal link audit is, and how to run one

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Internal link structure decays quietly. You publish something new, you link back to the two or three older posts you happen to remember, and you move on. The posts you do not remember get nothing. Repeat that across a few hundred articles and a few years, and you have a site where some pages are linked from a dozen places and others from nowhere at all — with no way to tell which is which by reading it.

An internal link audit is how you make that structure visible. It is the difference between assuming your site links together sensibly and knowing where it does not.

This article covers what an audit checks, and a repeatable way to run one. It sits within the wider practice covered in the complete guide to internal linking for SEO.

What an internal link audit is

An internal link audit is a systematic review of the links within your own site: which pages link to which, how many inbound internal links each page has, and whether the anchor text describes where the link goes.

It is not a backlink audit. That examines the links pointing to your site from other domains, which you mostly do not control. An internal link audit examines the links you placed yourself, every one of which you can change.

It is also more than a broken-link check. Finding links that lead to deleted pages is part of an audit, but a page can have no broken links pointing at it and still be invisible to the rest of the site because nothing links to it at all.

An audit is periodic rather than one-off, for a structural reason: the link graph changes every time you publish. A page that was well connected a year and fifty posts ago may be underlinked now, because the site grew around it.

What an audit looks for

Five things.

Orphan pages. An orphan page is an indexed page with no internal links pointing to it at all. Nothing on the site leads a reader or a crawler to it. It can still be reached from the sitemap or from outside, but within the site it is stranded.

Underlinked pages. An underlinked page has fewer inbound internal links than its importance calls for. The word importance is doing real work here: the expected number is relative to the rest of your site and to how important the page is, not a fixed count. A cornerstone guide with three inbound links is underlinked; a minor note with the same three may be linked exactly as much as it warrants.

Anchor text quality. Anchor text is the visible, clickable words of a link. An audit flags anchors that describe nothing — “click here”, “read more”, “this post” — on links that matter. A descriptive anchor tells a reader where the link goes before they click, and tells a search engine what the destination is about. A generic anchor wastes both.

Link depth. Link depth is how many clicks a page sits from the home page. Pages buried deep are discovered later and re-crawled less often than pages a click or two from the top. An audit surfaces the pages that have drifted too far down.

Broken and redirected internal links. Links to pages that have moved or been deleted, and redirect chains where a single hop would do. These are the most familiar kind of link problem and the narrowest — worth fixing, but not the whole audit.

How to run an internal link audit

The method is the same whether you do it by hand or with a tool. The difference is how far it scales.

1. Inventory your internal links. List every internal link on the site: its source page, its destination, and its anchor text. On a small site a crawler will export this in a few minutes. By hand, it means holding the entire site in your head at once — which is why manual audits tend to happen once and not twice.

2. Find the orphans. Compare every indexed page against the set of pages that appear as a destination anywhere. Anything that is indexed but never a destination is orphaned. One practical note before you start: exclude your utility pages first. A privacy policy, terms page, and cookie notice are all legitimately orphaned, and none of that is a problem worth solving. Left in, they bury the orphans that matter under noise. Finding orphans reliably is its own method — a crawler alone cannot, since it follows links an orphan does not have — and how to find and fix orphan pages covers the routes in full.

3. Find the underlinked. Rank your pages by inbound internal links relative to their importance. The pages with the largest shortfall between the links they have and the links they warrant are your real opportunities — usually older, substantial posts that newer writing should be pointing at and is not. These are the pages where directing more link equity does the most good.

4. Review the anchors. Look at the anchor text on your most important internal links. Where an anchor says nothing about its destination, rewrite it so it does. This is quick, and it is the part of an audit most often skipped. The habits that make an anchor useful are covered in anchor text for internal links.

5. Fix, then re-check. Add links from relevant existing posts to the orphaned and underlinked pages, correct the weak anchors, and run the audit again. An audit is only finished when the next pass comes back clean.

One honest limit, stated plainly: an audit shows you the structural gaps in how your site links together. It does not tell you what closing them will do to any particular ranking, because no one can honestly tell you that. Internal links help readers and search engines reach the work you have already published. That is a sound reason to fix them, and it is the reason to trust.

Running the audit continuously with Core+ Links

Steps one through three are the part that does not scale by hand, and they are the part Core+ Links indexes your content to handle on your own server.

It indexes your published posts and pages, then builds two reports from that index: the orphan and underlinked reports, which name the pages nothing links to and the pages linked less than their importance calls for. While you write, it also ranks the most relevant internal targets for the post in front of you, each with a match score and the eight ranking signals that produced it — so the audit stops being a periodic project and becomes something that happens as you publish.

The orphan and underlinked reports, built from the same index the suggestions come from.

The ranking is deterministic: the same content and the same settings produce the same result every time. Indexing and ranking run entirely on your WordPress install. No content is sent anywhere, no API key is required, and there is no account to create.

How often to run an internal link audit

Tie the cadence to how much you publish, not to the calendar. Every batch of new posts creates the same two problems at once: the newest pages are the most likely to be underlinked, because nothing written before them could link to them, and the older pages they should point to are the easiest to forget. A quarterly audit catches this late. An index that updates as you write catches it while the post is still open.

Run it after you publish, and the structure never drifts far enough to need rescuing.

Internal linking is worth doing well because it is one of the few parts of your site’s structure entirely within your control. An audit is how you keep it that way.

Try it on your own site — download Core Plus Links Free.

Introducing Core+ Links: scored internal link suggestions

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Internal linking is added by memory, and only in one direction.

You draft a new post, recall an older one that fits, and link to it. This works going forward, not backward: a post published in March is never linked from anything written in April, because April’s writing is not informed by March’s archive. Repeated across two years and a few hundred posts, the result is a site where some pages are linked from a dozen places and others from none, with no practical way to tell which is which.

Auditing that by hand means holding an entire site in memory at once. Doing it once is possible. Auditing it by hand a second time is not realistic, and so it is left undone.

Core+ Links is a free WordPress plugin that performs that audit continuously. It indexes published content, scores every possible link target against the post currently being edited, and returns the ranked results in the block editor sidebar, together with the reason each one ranked where it did.

What it does

Three things, in order.

It indexes your content. Titles, excerpts, headings, cleaned body text, taxonomy terms, slugs, parent/child relationships, and existing internal link counts. All of it is stored in tables in your own WordPress database. Free indexes posts and pages only.

It scores candidates while you write. Opening a post in the block editor opens the Core Plus Links sidebar, which ranks the most relevant targets from your own content. Each result shows a match score; expanding it shows the signals that produced that score.

You insert with one click. Confirm or edit the suggested anchor text, then insert. Dismissed suggestions stay dismissed — they do not reappear later with a different score.

The scoring, in full

Every candidate is scored across eight signals, each normalised to a 0–1 range and combined into a single weighted sum. This is the mechanism most internal-linking tools decline to disclose.

Signal	Weight	What it measures
Taxonomy overlap	0.30	Shared categories and tags
Title overlap	0.20	Term overlap between the two titles
Body keyword overlap	0.15	Term overlap across cleaned body text
Heading overlap	0.10	Term overlap across headings, tracked separately from body
Link graph relevance	0.10	How the candidate sits in your existing link structure
Excerpt overlap	0.05	Term overlap in excerpts
Custom field overlap	0.05	Overlap across indexed custom fields (Pro Upcoming; dropped on Free)
Priority score	0.05	Manual priority you have set on a page

The weights sum to exactly 1.00. There is no hidden ninth signal and no adjustment layer applied on top of the arithmetic.

Why taxonomy outweighs the title

This weighting is the one figure in the table that requires explanation.

Shared words are weak evidence that two posts are related. A post called “The Best Books of 2025” and a post called “Best Camera Bags” share the word “best” and nothing else that matters. Weighting title overlap heavily produces exactly this failure: results that are lexically similar and topically unrelated. This is the common failure mode of keyword-matching link plugins.

Shared taxonomy is stronger evidence. Filing two posts under the same category is a judgement that they belong together — and that judgement carries more information than word frequency.

Weighting title and heading too heavily produces exactly this failure. Taxonomy therefore leads at 0.30; title and body carry the remaining textual weight; heading and excerpt contribute at lower weights. On Free, custom field overlap is dropped because Free does not index custom fields.

What happens when a signal does not apply

If a site does not use categories and tags, scoring every candidate against taxonomy would permanently cap what any suggestion could achieve. Signals a site does not use are dropped from the calculation entirely, rather than reducing every score by a fixed amount.

The distinction: this protects a site that does not use a signal — not an individual post that lacks it. If a site does use taxonomy and a particular target has none, that target takes a real zero, because redistributing its weight onto title matching would reward exactly the shallow word collisions the weighting was designed to avoid.

A penalty is applied after the weighted sum: a page that is already heavily linked scores lower than the same page would with fewer inbound links. The penalty directs suggestions toward pages that still need links, rather than adding further weight to pages that already have them.

The full model, including normalisation and the penalty thresholds, is documented in how ranking works.

Reproducible, and why that matters

Same content, same settings, same results — every time.

It is the difference between a tool that can be used and one that must be managed. A suggestion rejected on Monday does not return on Thursday with a different score and a different position. When a ranking looks wrong, the breakdown identifies the signal responsible, and the cause can be corrected directly — commonly a tag applied more broadly than intended.

Nothing is inferred. There is no model, no external call, and nothing to take on faith.

Finding what you would not

Two reports, both built from the same index.

The dashboard overview: indexed content, orphan and underlinked counts, and index health at a glance.

Orphan pages are indexed pages with no internal links pointing to them at all. Underlinked pages have fewer inbound links than their importance calls for.

Exclude utility pages before reading these reports. A privacy policy, terms page, and cookie notice are orphaned by design and require no action. Exclusion in Core+ Links is total and bidirectional: an excluded page is never offered as a target, receives no suggestions when edited, and does not appear in the reports at all.

The reports identify structural gaps. They do not predict the effect of closing those gaps on search rankings — no tool can verify that outcome.

What runs where

Everything, on your own server.

Indexing and ranking run in PHP against your own database. Core Plus Links Free sends no content anywhere, requires no API key, requires no account, and has no telemetry.

Core+ Links Pro (Upcoming) adds optional AI-assisted matching using a provider key you supply. This is turned on deliberately; once enabled, content is sent to the provider chosen, under that provider’s terms. The feature is off by default. Stating this exception is what makes the privacy claim for Free credible — full detail is on the privacy page.

What is in the free version

The whole deterministic product, not a preview of it.

Posts and pages indexed · suggestions in the block editor · inbound and outbound link listings · editable anchor text before insert · one-click insert · dismissals that persist · a context bank for taxonomies and exclusions · suggested exclusions for utility pages (you review; never auto-applied) · orphan and underlinked reports · Auto-linking (keyword rules, review, apply selected, per-row undo) · Link Health for unpublished, trashed, or missing internal targets · background, manual, and scheduled reindexing · logs and index health monitoring.

Free indexes posts and pages only. Custom post types and custom field indexing are Upcoming in Pro. This release supports the block editor only. Per-site activation is supported; network activation on multisite is not, and the plugin states this explicitly rather than failing silently.

Free is not a time-limited trial. There is no feature expiry, and no plan to move current features out of Free to sell Pro.

Installing it

Core Plus Links requires WordPress 6.6 or later and PHP 7.4 or later. Install it from WordPress.org, or download the ZIP, run the first index, and open any post. Once indexing finishes, the sidebar shows ranked suggestions for that post. Auto-linking and Link Health are in the Core Plus Links admin.

For more detail on the mechanism, the features page covers indexing scope, the sidebar, and the reports.

Link equity, explained

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Link equity is one of those SEO terms that gets wrapped in more mystique than it deserves. Underneath the jargon is a simple idea: a link passes some of one page’s authority to another. Understanding how that works, and where it stops being measurable, is enough to make better decisions about which pages on your site link to which — and it sits at the centre of the complete guide to internal linking for SEO.

This article covers what link equity is, how it moves through a site, what affects how much passes, and how to direct it toward the pages that need it.

What link equity is

Link equity is the ranking value that one page passes to another through a link. You will also see it called “link juice” — the same idea, less formally.

The concept comes from PageRank, Google’s original method of measuring a page’s importance by the links pointing to it. Google has confirmed on the record that PageRank remains one of the many signals it uses to rank pages. Every link — internal or external — can carry some of this value from its source page to its destination.

For internal linking, the useful part is this: the authority your site earns, whether on the home page or on a post that attracted external links, does not have to stay where it landed. You can move it around your own site by choosing what links to what.

How link equity flows through a site

Think of authority as something that enters your site at a few strong points and then spreads along your internal links.

Your home page usually carries the most, because it tends to attract the most external links. When it links to a category page, some of that value flows through. When the category links to an individual post, more flows again. A page with many inbound internal links from strong pages accumulates more equity than a page linked from nowhere.

This is why site structure and topic clusters matter so much. A shallow, well-connected structure lets equity reach your important pages in a click or two. A deep or broken structure leaves value stranded near the top and pages at the bottom starved of it.

A page with no inbound internal links at all — an orphan page — receives no internal equity, because there is no link to carry any. That is one of several reasons orphan pages are worth finding and fixing.

What affects how much equity passes

A link is not a fixed-size pipe. Several things change how much value moves through it.

The number of links on the source page. The equity a page can pass is divided among its outbound links. A page with a hundred links passes a fraction through each; a page with a handful passes more through every one. This is the dilution principle, and it is the reason how many internal links a page has is worth thinking about.

Whether the link can be followed. A link a search engine cannot crawl, or one marked nofollow, does not pass equity the way an ordinary followed link does. Keep internal links as real, followable <a href> links.

Placement and prominence. A prominent link in the main content tends to be weighted more than one buried in a footer, in line with the way search engines model how likely a link is to be clicked.

Relevance and anchor text. A link between two topically related pages is more useful, to both readers and search engines, than one between unrelated pages — and the anchor text that describes the destination is part of how that relevance is read.

A worked example

Suppose you publish a definitive guide to a topic and it earns a dozen external links over a year. It is now one of the strongest pages on your site. Elsewhere, you have three older posts on the same topic that never attracted links of their own and sit several clicks deep.

Left alone, the guide’s authority mostly stays with the guide. Add a contextual link from the guide to each of the three older posts, and some of that authority now flows to them — and because the posts are topically related, the links are useful to readers arriving on the guide as well. You have not created authority from nothing — you have directed what you already earned toward the pages that had none. That is the whole of the practice.

How to direct link equity where it helps

The practical goal is to move authority toward the pages that need it and away from wasting it.

Link from your strong pages to your important ones. Identify the pages that have earned the most external links, and add internal links from them to the newer or important pages you want to strengthen. This channels authority where you need it most.

Fix the pages getting none. Orphan pages receive no internal equity, and underlinked pages receive less than their importance warrants. Both are surfaced by a full internal link audit.

Do not pile more onto pages that already have plenty. Adding a tenth inbound link to a page that is already well connected does less than adding the first inbound link to a page that has none. Spread equity toward what needs it rather than concentrating it where it is already abundant.

The honest limit

Here is where restraint matters. You cannot see the exact amount of equity a page holds or passes. The internal PageRank figures that some tools report are estimates built from your link graph, not numbers Google publishes. They are useful for spotting which pages are relatively strong or weak, and not for anything more precise than that.

And directing equity toward a page does not guarantee it will rank better. Link equity is one signal among many, and no one can honestly promise that redistributing it will move a specific ranking. What you can say is true is narrower and still worth acting on: a page with relevant inbound internal links from strong pages is better placed to be discovered, crawled, and understood than a page with none.

Link equity in Core+ Links

Two parts of Core+ Links relate directly to how equity moves through your site.

One of the eight ranking signals is link-graph relevance — where a candidate page sits in your existing internal link structure — so suggestions account for how your site is already connected rather than treating every page in isolation.

There is also a penalty applied after the weighted score: a page that is already heavily linked scores lower as a suggestion than one that is not. The intent is exactly the point of this article — to spread links toward the pages that need them, rather than onto whatever is already well connected. The underlinked report names those pages directly.

The reports show inbound and outbound link counts per page, so underlinked pages are named directly.

Everything runs on your own WordPress install, deterministically, and sends nothing off-site.

Try it on your own site — download Core+ Links Free.

Anchor text for internal links

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Anchor text is a small thing that does a large amount of work. It is the visible, clickable part of a link, and it is one of the clearest signals you can send about what a page is about — to a reader deciding whether to click, and to a search engine deciding what the destination covers.

This article is about anchor text for internal links specifically: what it is, why it matters, the forms it takes, and how to write it well. It is one part of the complete guide to internal linking for SEO.

What anchor text is

Anchor text is the clickable words of a hyperlink. In HTML, it is the text between the opening and closing anchor tags:

<a href="/link-equity/">how link equity flows through a site</a>

Here the anchor text is “how link equity flows through a site”. A reader sees those words; a search engine reads them as a description of the page the link points to.

Why anchor text matters

Anchor text gives context. Google’s guidance on crawlable links is explicit that good link text helps it understand what the linked page is about — and it recommends writing descriptive text rather than generic phrases.

For a reader, descriptive anchor text sets an expectation before the click: “our guide to keyword research” tells them exactly where they are going. For a search engine, it is a labelled signal about the destination’s topic. An anchor that reads “click here” gives neither a reader nor a search engine anything to work with. It is a wasted opportunity on every link where it appears.

Because internal links are ones you place and control entirely, they are the easiest place to get anchor text right — and the most common place it is neglected. The anchor also plays a part in how link equity is read: a relevant, descriptive link between two related pages is more useful than a vague one between unrelated pages.

The forms anchor text takes

You will encounter a few kinds, and it helps to name them.

Descriptive anchors name the destination in natural language: “how to find and fix orphan pages”. These are the ones to aim for.

Exact-match anchors are the target’s keyword verbatim: “orphan pages”. Fine in moderation, and natural when the keyword genuinely fits the sentence.

Partial-match anchors contain the topic within a longer phrase: “dealing with orphan pages on a large site”.

Branded anchors use a product or site name: “Core+ Links”.

Generic anchors say nothing about the destination: “click here”, “read more”, “this post”. These are the ones to avoid on any link that matters.

Naked URLs show the address itself: “/blog/link-equity/”. Occasionally useful, rarely ideal as body-content anchor text.

How to write internal anchor text well

A few habits cover most of it.

Name the destination. The anchor should describe what the reader will find. If you removed the surrounding sentence, the anchor alone should still hint at the target.

Keep it concise. A few descriptive words are enough. A whole sentence wrapped in a link is hard to read and dilutes the signal.

Front-load the meaning. Put the descriptive words in the anchor itself, not in the text around it.

Vary your anchors naturally. Linking to the same page with identical anchor text every time reads mechanically. The same destination can be reached from “internal linking strategy”, “planning your internal links”, and “how to structure internal links”, each fitting its own sentence.

Stay relevant. The anchor and the destination should match. An anchor that promises one thing and leads to another erodes trust and confuses the signal.

A worked example

Take a single sentence and watch the anchor do the work. Written poorly:

We wrote about improving your site’s structure. To learn more, click here.

The reader learns nothing from the link, and neither does a search engine. Now written well:

A shallow hierarchy helps authority reach your key pages — see site structure and topic clusters for how to plan one.

Same link, same destination. The second version tells the reader exactly what they will get, describes the target to a search engine, and reads naturally in the sentence. Nothing about it is more work than “click here” once it is a habit — which is the point.

A note on over-optimisation

It is possible to overthink this. Repeating the exact-match keyword as the anchor on every internal link, regardless of how it reads, produces robotic text that serves the keyword rather than the reader.

Internal anchors carry less risk here than external ones, because you control the whole context and a search engine expects your own site to link to itself. Still, the goal is the same as the rest of good internal linking: write for the reader first, and the signal takes care of itself. If an anchor reads naturally and describes where it goes, it is doing its job.

Reviewing anchor quality across a site is one part of a full internal link audit — it is the check most often skipped, because generic anchors are invisible until you go looking for them.

Anchor text in Core+ Links

When Core+ Links suggests an internal link in the block editor, you choose the anchor text as you insert it. The suggestion identifies the relevant destination and its match score; you decide how to phrase the link so it fits the sentence and describes the target. The insertion is one action, and the anchor is yours to write rather than generated for you.

The suggested anchor text is editable — you name the destination before inserting the link.

Because the suggestion already tells you what the destination is about — and shows the signals behind the match — writing a descriptive anchor is a matter of naming what you are linking to, not guessing at it. The tool runs entirely on your own WordPress install, deterministically, and sends nothing off-site.

Try it on your own site — download Core+ Links Free.

How many internal links per page?

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It is one of the most common questions in internal linking, and it has an unsatisfying but honest answer: there is no fixed number. What there is instead is a set of factors that decide the right count for a given page, and a trade-off worth understanding. Once you have those, the question mostly answers itself.

This article covers whether a magic number exists, what actually determines the count, the dilution principle underneath it, and a default you can work from. It is one part of the complete guide to internal linking for SEO.

Is there a magic number?

No. There was once a widely repeated guideline of keeping to around 100 links per page, but that came from an old technical limit that no longer applies, and Google long ago removed the specific figure from its guidance. The current position is to keep the number of links on a page to a reasonable amount — a judgement, not a fixed cap.

So the useful question is not “what is the limit” but “what is the right number for this page”. That depends on a few things.

What determines the right count

The length and depth of the content. A three-thousand-word guide naturally supports more internal links than a short post, because it covers more ground and more genuine linking opportunities arise. Count follows content, not the other way around.

Relevance. The right links are the ones that genuinely help a reader understand the topic or reach related content. A relevant link earns its place; an unrelated one does not, however much room the page has. Describing each with clear anchor text is part of making it earn its place.

The trade-off between links. This is the part worth understanding properly, because it is the reason more is not always better.

The dilution principle

Every link on a page shares in the authority that page can pass. The link equity a page has to give is divided among its outbound links, so a page with a hundred links passes roughly a hundredth through each, while a page with five passes far more through every one.

This does not mean you should hoard links. It means each link has a cost, and that cost is worth paying only when the link helps. Adding a genuinely useful link is a good trade; padding a page with marginal links spreads its value thin and gives a reader more noise to wade through.

There is a readability cost too. A page peppered with links is harder to read, and a search engine may reasonably read heavy over-linking as optimisation ahead of usefulness.

One clarification that resolves a lot of confusion: the “how many” question is really about contextual links in the body of your content. The links in your header, footer, and sidebar are part of your site’s template and appear on nearly every page. They matter for site structure, but they are not what you are counting when you ask how many links a given article should have.

So when the guidance below says “a handful of links”, it means a handful of editorial links within the content — over and above the navigation that is already there on every page.

A sensible default

For a typical article, a handful of relevant contextual links — on the order of three to five — is a sound starting point, alongside your normal navigation. Scale it with the length and depth of the piece: a long, comprehensive guide will carry more, and a short post fewer.

The test for any single link is simple: does it genuinely help someone understand or continue with the topic? If yes, include it. If not, leave it out. Counting to a target is the wrong instinct; judging each link on its merits is the right one.

To make that concrete: a 1,200-word how-to might carry three or four links — one up to its pillar, one or two to closely related posts, and perhaps one to a definition of a term it uses. A 4,000-word guide covering many sub-topics might carry a dozen, because a dozen genuinely relevant destinations exist within it. Neither number was chosen in advance; both fell out of asking, at each link, whether it earned its place. The long guide does not have more links because it is long — it has more because it has more to connect.

Too few, and too many

Both directions have a failure mode.

Too few and you miss real connections. Pages end up underlinked, or worse, orphaned — reachable by nothing on the site. Finding those is covered in how to find and fix orphan pages.

Too many and you dilute the value passing through each link, and you make the page harder to read. Long lists of barely-relevant links help no one.

The healthy middle is not a number. It is a habit of linking where it helps and stopping when it does not — which is easier to hold as a principle than to apply consistently across a whole site by hand. Checking that the habit is actually holding, across every page, is the work of a full internal link audit.

How Core+ Links helps with the count

The problem with “link where it helps” is knowing where that is, across a site of any size. Core+ Links addresses the count from the other end: rather than prompting you to add more links, it ranks the most relevant candidates for the post you are writing, each with a match score and the signals behind it, so you add the few that genuinely fit rather than as many as possible.

A short ranked list surfaces the few links that fit — not a prompt to add more.

It also applies a penalty to pages that are already heavily linked, which pushes suggestions toward pages that need a link rather than pages that already have plenty. The effect is fewer, better-placed links. It runs on your own WordPress install, deterministically, and sends nothing off-site.

Try it on your own site — download Core+ Links Free.

Internal linking for SEO: the complete guide

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Of everything that affects how a site performs in search, internal linking is among the few parts entirely within your control. You do not have to earn it from anyone, you do not have to wait for it, and no algorithm update takes it away. It is also among the most neglected, because it decays quietly: every post you publish links back to a few older ones you happen to remember, and the rest slowly fall out of the structure.

This guide explains the mechanism and cites the sources. It does not promise what any change will do to a ranking, because no one can honestly promise that. What it can do is show you how internal links work, why search engines rely on them, how to structure them well, and how to keep them healthy as your site grows.

Key takeaways

Internal linking is the SEO lever most within your control, and one of the most neglected.
Contextual links in the body of a page carry more weight than navigational, footer, or sidebar links.
Internal links matter to search engines for four reasons — discovery, link equity, hierarchy, and anchor-text context — each of which Google has stated in its own documentation.
Good internal linking is about structure, not volume: a shallow hierarchy, topic clusters, descriptive anchors, and intentional linking.
Structure decays as a site grows, so internal linking is maintained with a periodic audit — which stops being possible by hand past a few hundred pages.

What is internal linking?

An internal link is a hyperlink from one page on your site to another page on the same site. Internal linking is the practice of placing those links deliberately, so that readers and search engines can move through your content along paths you have chosen.

In HTML, an internal link is an anchor element with an href pointing at another page on your domain:

<a href="/internal-link-audit/">how to run an internal link audit</a>

The visible, clickable words — “how to run an internal link audit” — are the anchor text, and they do more work than they appear to. More on that below.

Internal links vs. external links

The distinction is simple and worth stating once, because the two are often discussed together.

	Internal link	External link
Points to	Another page on your own site	A page on a different domain
You control it	Entirely	Rarely — you control outbound ones, not inbound
Primary role	Structure, navigation, and context within your site	Citing sources and earning references between sites

Both matter. This guide is about the internal set, for one reason: it is the set you fully control. You decide which pages link to which, with what anchor text, from where on the page. Nothing about internal linking depends on anyone else’s decision.

The types of internal links

Not every internal link carries the same weight. These are the kinds you will place, roughly in order of how much they contribute.

Contextual links appear in the body of your content. They are editorial — you place them because they genuinely help the reader — and they sit where an engaged reader is most likely to click. These carry the most weight, and most of this guide is about them.

Navigational links are your header and menu links. They establish the site’s hierarchy and appear on every page, which makes them structurally important but template-level.

Breadcrumb links trace a page back up its hierarchy. Google has said it treats breadcrumbs as ordinary links, and they help both readers and crawlers understand where a page sits.

Footer links point to utility and legal pages — privacy policy, terms, contact. They are useful for people looking for them and carry little ranking weight.

Related and sidebar links surface adjacent content at the end of a post or alongside it. They help readers find more and they spread links across a site, but as template elements they are discounted relative to editorial body links.

The principle underneath this ordering: a link in the main content, high on the page, is worth more than the same link in a footer or sidebar. Place the links you care about where readers actually read.

Contextual links in the body carry more weight than navigation, breadcrumb, sidebar, or footer links.

Why internal linking matters for SEO

There are four reasons, and each is something Google has stated rather than something the SEO industry inferred. Where a claim is Google’s, it is linked to Google’s own source.

They help search engines discover your pages

Search engines find pages by following links from pages they already know. Google’s own guide to how Search works describes discovery this way: “Some pages are known because Google has already crawled them before. Other pages are discovered when Google follows a link from a known page to a new page.”

The consequence is direct. A page that nothing on your site links to — an orphan page — is much harder to discover. It may still be reached through your XML sitemap or an external link, but within your site, nothing leads to it. Finding and fixing these is a discipline of its own; see how to find and fix orphan pages.

They distribute link equity across your site

Links pass authority between pages. This is the idea behind PageRank, and Google has confirmed on the record that PageRank remains one of the many signals it uses. When a page with authority links to another page on your site, some of that authority flows along the link.

The practical use is that you can direct authority toward the pages that need it — newer posts, or important pages that have not earned many external links — by linking to them from your established ones. How this works, and where it stops being something you can measure, is covered in how link equity flows through a site.

They establish hierarchy and context

The pages you link to most, and the places you link from, tell search engines what you consider important. Google’s John Mueller has described internal linking as “one of the biggest things you can do on a website to guide Google and visitors to the pages that you think are important” — and added that what counts as important “is totally up to you.”

That is the strategic core of internal linking: it is how you express, in a form a crawler can read, which of your pages matter and how they relate. Getting that structure right is the subject of site structure and topic clusters.

Anchor text gives context

The anchor text of a link — its visible, clickable words — describes the destination to both readers and search engines. Google’s guidance on crawlable links is explicit that good link text helps it understand the linked page. An anchor that reads “email segmentation guide” tells a search engine what the target is about; one that reads “click here” tells it nothing. Descriptive anchors are covered in full in descriptive anchor text for internal links.

One boundary, stated plainly. Internal links make your work reachable, spread authority, and add context. Whether any specific change lifts any specific ranking is not something anyone can promise — the variables are too many and none of them are in one person’s hands. Everything in this section is worth doing regardless, because it is true of how the web is crawled and read, not because of a promised result.

How to build an internal linking structure

This is the practical core. None of it is difficult; it takes intention and consistency, which is the part that is genuinely hard to sustain by hand.

Plan a shallow hierarchy

Keep your important pages within roughly three clicks of the home page. A shallow structure means readers reach your key content quickly and crawlers find it without traversing a deep chain of links. A page buried ten clicks down is discovered late and re-crawled rarely.

A shallow hierarchy keeps important pages within a few clicks of the home page.

Organise with topic clusters and pillar pages

A topic cluster is a broad pillar page that covers a subject at a high level, surrounded by focused pages that each cover one part of it in depth. The pillar links down to each cluster page, and each cluster page links back up to the pillar. This is exactly the structure this guide sits at the centre of: it is the pillar for internal linking, and the articles it links to are its cluster.

The clusters signal to a search engine that you cover a topic comprehensively, and they give readers a coherent path through it. The full method — clusters, pillar pages, and how they relate to URL structure — is covered in site structure and topic clusters.

A pillar page and its cluster pages link to each other, both ways.

Link to the pages that matter most

Point your links at the content you most want found: your cornerstone articles, your key product or service pages, the posts you consider definitive. You can link to anything, but the pages you link to most are the ones you are telling search engines to treat as important — so choose deliberately.

Write descriptive anchor text

Name the destination in the link. “Our guide to keyword research” tells a reader and a search engine exactly what they will find; “click here” and “read more” waste the opportunity. Vary your anchors naturally rather than pointing at the same page with identical text every time. This is a quick habit that most sites skip, and it is one of the clearest signals you can send.

Place important links in the body, early

A link earns more attention, and passes more weight, when it sits in the main content where engaged readers actually click, rather than in a footer or a sidebar they skim past. Put the links you care about in the body of the page, and place them high rather than burying them at the end.

Link intentionally, not excessively

There is no magic number of internal links. A handful of genuinely relevant contextual links in a typical article is a sound default, and the right count depends on the length and depth of the piece. What is worth understanding is the trade-off: every link on a page divides the value passed through the others, so a page with a hundred links passes very little through each. The question to ask of any link is whether it genuinely helps someone understand the topic. If it does not, leave it out. This is covered in full in how many internal links a page should have.

Add links to older posts when you publish

New content does not connect itself. When you publish a post, the older, related articles that should point to it do not update themselves to do so — and that gap is exactly how orphan pages and underlinked pages form. The habit that prevents it is to add links to a new post from relevant existing content at the time you publish, and to revisit older posts as you write new ones.

This backward-linking problem is the reason automated internal linking tools exist at all: holding an entire site’s structure in your head, so that every new post links to and from the right older ones, is not realistic past a certain size.

Keep your links crawlable

For a link to pass value, a search engine has to be able to follow it. Use real <a href> links rather than JavaScript-driven controls, keep internal links dofollow by default, and reserve nofollow for pages you do not want indexed. A link a crawler cannot follow does none of the work described in this guide.

How to keep internal linking healthy: the audit

Internal link structure is not something you set once. It changes every time you publish, and it degrades in predictable ways. Keeping it healthy means checking, periodically, for three things:

Broken internal links — links to pages that have moved or been deleted.
Orphan pages — indexed pages that nothing links to.
Underlinked pages and link opportunities — important pages with fewer inbound links than their importance calls for.

Doing this by hand means holding your whole site in your head at once: every page, every link, every anchor. It works for a small site and becomes impossible somewhere past a few hundred pages. The full method is in a complete internal link audit, which covers all three checks, and how to find and fix orphan pages for the one that catches people out most.

Internal linking on your own site with Core+ Links

The parts of this that do not scale by hand — holding the full set of pages and links, finding the orphans, ranking which existing pages a new post should link to — are the parts Core+ Links handles on your own server.

It indexes your published posts and pages, then ranks the most relevant internal targets for the post you are writing, each with a match score and the eight signals that produced it, directly in the block editor. From the same index it builds the orphan and underlinked reports — the audit checks above, made continuous rather than periodic. Every suggestion shows the eight ranking signals behind it, so nothing is a black box.

Core+ Links is deterministic: the same content and the same settings produce the same result every time. Indexing and ranking run entirely on your WordPress install. No content is sent anywhere, no API key is required, and there is no account to create.

Key points to take away

Internal linking is controllable, it compounds, and it is true of how the web works rather than of any one algorithm. It helps search engines discover your pages, distributes authority across your site, expresses which pages you consider important, and gives context through anchor text — all of which Google has stated in its own documentation. Getting it right is a matter of structure over volume: a shallow hierarchy, topic clusters, descriptive anchors, and links placed with intent. And because the structure decays as a site grows, it is maintained by auditing it — continuously, once a site is large enough that doing so by hand is no longer realistic.

It is worth doing well because it is within your control and because it reflects how your site is actually crawled and read. That is a sound reason on its own, and it does not depend on a promised ranking.

Try it on your own site — download Core+ Links Free.

Core+ Links Blog

Site structure and topic clusters

What site structure is

The hierarchical model

Topic clusters and pillar pages

Silos and clusters

How to plan your structure

Common structural mistakes

Site structure in Core+ Links

How to find and fix orphan pages

What an orphan page is

Why orphan pages happen

How to find orphan pages

How to fix orphan pages

Finding orphans continuously with Core+ Links

What an internal link audit is, and how to run one

What an internal link audit is

What an audit looks for

How to run an internal link audit

Running the audit continuously with Core+ Links

How often to run an internal link audit

Introducing Core+ Links: scored internal link suggestions

What it does

The scoring, in full

Why taxonomy outweighs the title

What happens when a signal does not apply

Reproducible, and why that matters

Finding what you would not

What runs where

What is in the free version

Installing it

Link equity, explained

What link equity is

How link equity flows through a site

What affects how much equity passes

A worked example

How to direct link equity where it helps

The honest limit

Link equity in Core+ Links

Anchor text for internal links

What anchor text is

Why anchor text matters

The forms anchor text takes

How to write internal anchor text well

A worked example

A note on over-optimisation

Anchor text in Core+ Links

How many internal links per page?

Is there a magic number?

What determines the right count

The dilution principle

Navigation links count differently

A sensible default

Too few, and too many

How Core+ Links helps with the count

Internal linking for SEO: the complete guide

Key takeaways

What is internal linking?

Internal links vs. external links

The types of internal links

Why internal linking matters for SEO

They help search engines discover your pages

They distribute link equity across your site

They establish hierarchy and context

Anchor text gives context

How to build an internal linking structure

Plan a shallow hierarchy

Organise with topic clusters and pillar pages

Link to the pages that matter most

Write descriptive anchor text

Place important links in the body, early

Link intentionally, not excessively

Add links to older posts when you publish

Keep your links crawlable

How to keep internal linking healthy: the audit

Internal linking on your own site with Core+ Links

Key points to take away