What is Internal linking?

Internal linking is the practice of linking from one page on your site to another. It drives crawler discovery, distributes ranking authority through the site, and signals which pages relate to which topics.

How it works

Crawlers find pages by following links, so internal links are the primary discovery path for new content. They also pass authority: a link from a strong page lends weight to the target. And the anchor text plus surrounding context tells engines what the linked page is about.

Effective internal linking is deliberate, with descriptive anchors and links placed where they genuinely help, rather than a footer dump of every URL.

Internal linking vs backlinks

Backlinks come from other sites and signal external endorsement; internal links come from your own site and signal structure and emphasis. You fully control internal links, which makes them the most reliable lever you have: you cannot manufacture backlinks safely, but you can always improve how your own pages connect.

Why it matters for B2B

Internal links are how a short glossary page earns the right to be cited. A 180-word definition that is linked from its pillar and cross-linked to three sibling terms reads as a node in an authoritative cluster, not a thin orphan. This was the exact factor that kept your AI-Search Glossary out of thin-content territory, and the new glossary should replicate the same Related-terms and Go-deeper linking on every page.