Using AI to improve internal linking

Why linking is worth the effort

Links between your own pages cost nothing, are entirely under your control, and shape both how visitors move and how your site is understood. Most sites barely use them, which makes this unusually cheap ground.

They also decide what is reachable for a reader, a crawler or an answer engine. A page nothing links to is effectively invisible, which our page on orphan pages covers, and large sites accumulate those faster than anybody expects.

The full case sits on our internal linking page. The short version is that a link inside a sentence, where the subject comes up, does far more than a list of links at the foot.

What a tool can genuinely do

Find the places where a subject is mentioned and a page about it exists. That is a matching problem across a whole site, and it is tedious and error-prone when done by reading.

Suggest wording. Click here and read more are the two worst link texts in common use, and proposing a descriptive alternative is a task a tool handles well under review.

And report the structure. Which pages have no links in, which have far too many out, which sections are isolated from the rest. Our site check reports the same things mechanically.

What has to stay human

Whether the link belongs in that sentence. A link is a promise about what the reader will find, and a suggestion that matches on a word rather than on meaning breaks that promise every time.

How many is too many. A paragraph with four links in it reads as spam and helps nobody. Judgment about density cannot be reduced to a rule that survives contact with real pages.

And the commercial decisions. Which pages deserve the most links pointing at them is a business question about what makes money, not a question about topical similarity.

A safe process for a bulk pass

The steps below exist because we broke a live page with a careless vocabulary pass on this site. A blind replacement across several files produced five separate breakages, including a rewritten link address.

• Work on one page at a time, never with a site-wide replace
• Review every suggested link in the sentence it lands in
• Never let a tool edit a link address, only the wording
• Cap links per paragraph, and keep the cap
• Check that each target page still exists after the pass
• Read the changed sentences aloud before publishing
• Re-run the site check after the pass, not before

The mistakes a bulk pass makes

Matching on a word that has two meanings. A page about licenses being linked from every mention of a software license, or a page about a trade being linked from an unrelated use of the same word.

Rewriting the address as well as the wording. This is the one that does real damage, because a link that used to work now points at a page that never existed and nothing warns you.

And over-linking the same target. Fifteen pages all linking to one page with identical wording reads as a pattern rather than as helpfulness, and it is a pattern quality systems recognize.

Where links should actually sit

Inside the sentence where the subject comes up. That is where a reader is curious, and that is the link that gets followed. A block at the foot of the page is a weaker second placement.

In the hub page, pointing down at everything beneath it, and in each page pointing back up. That two-way relationship is what makes a section behave like a section rather than a pile of pages.

And from your most-read pages to the ones that earn money. Our page on link wording covers how to phrase those so the reader knows what they are getting.

Checking the result

Count the links in and out of every page after the pass. A page that gained twenty inbound links overnight is a page that will look engineered, because it was.

Follow a sample by hand. Ten links, opened and read in context, will tell you more about the quality of the pass than any report, and it takes about five minutes.

Then leave it alone for a while. Linking is not a thing to optimize continuously, and the sites that suffer most are the ones where somebody keeps adjusting it every month.