Internal linking for topic clusters: a practical guide and an audit

Most content programmes publish more than they connect. The fix is a structure and a count, and the count is the part almost nobody does.

Written by the Colleviate Strategy desk

What Google says about links

Google's link guidance has two rules that matter here. Links need to be crawlable: an anchor element with an href, since that is what Google can follow. And the link text should be descriptive, in Google's words “descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it's on and to the page it links to.” That is the whole technical brief. Everything else is editorial judgement about which pages deserve to be joined.

The shape of a cluster

1. One hub that owns the broad topic and links out to every spoke.
2. Spokes, each answering one question completely. If two spokes answer the same question, merge them.
3. Links both ways. Every spoke links to the hub and to its two or three nearest siblings, inside the text where the topic comes up, not only in a footer.
4. A visible guide on every page of the cluster, so a reader can see the whole set.

Our share of search work is built this way. The Share of Search Index is the hub, nine category pages and the guides are the spokes, and a guide block on all of them lists the others. Each category page links back to the hub and to the benchmark guide, and the hub links to each of them from the section that discusses it.

The audit nobody does

Crawl your own site and, for each page, count the links that point to it from inside the body text of other pages, leaving out the menu, the footer and the “related” boxes that the template adds to every page. Sort ascending. The top of that list is where your internal linking is failing.

We ran it on our own Insights this month. Across 118 articles, 23 had no in-body links from any other article, a mix of sector pieces and older how-to articles, many written in a batch. They were reachable only through template boxes. That is the pattern to expect on any site that publishes in batches: the new work links to the old, and the old never learns about the new.

How to fix a page with no inbound links

• Find two articles where the topic is already mentioned and add the link there, in a sentence a reader would want.
• Name the destination in the anchor, as in how to redesign a website without losing rankings, not “click here” or “this article”.
• For a market-specific page such as international SEO for Indian brands, link from the pages on the process it extends, such as the technical SEO checklist.
• When you publish something new, spend as long updating three old pages as you spent writing the new one.

What to avoid

Do not repeat the same exact-match anchor across dozens of pages: describe each destination as the sentence around it allows. Do not hide links in widgets that readers will never use. Do not link everything to everything; a page with sixty links tells a crawler nothing about priority. And do not count the template's “related” box as linking; it is on every page, so it is a signal about none. For earning links from other sites, which is a different job, see content that earns links.

Related. What happened to our own impressions as we linked and published: the first ninety days of Search Console.