Internal linking for small sites: a simple system

Internal linking advice is usually written for sites with 50,000 pages and a team. If you have 40 pages and a product to ship, "build a topical authority silo architecture" is not actionable.

Small sites need something they can keep up with. Here's the system we use, which we first built for Versely, our own product, and now run on LaunchRanked. It's four rules and one monthly check.

Short answer: Group pages under a few hub pages. Give every article at least three internal links to relevant pages, and make sure every important page gets at least one link from another page. Use descriptive anchor text. Once a month, find pages with no internal links pointing to them and fix them.

Why internal links matter more on a small site

Google explains that it "uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl." (Link best practices) On a new site with few backlinks, your own links are most of the links Google sees.

They do three jobs:

1. Discovery. Google finds new pages by following links. A page nothing links to depends entirely on your sitemap.
2. Context. The anchor text and the surrounding paragraph tell Google what the linked page is about.
3. Priority. Pages you link to often look more important than pages you link to once.

Google's guidance is short: "Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site." Most small sites fail even that, usually for blog posts that were published and never linked again.

Rule 1: pick a few hubs

A hub is a page that sums up a topic and links to everything under it. On a small site you need three to six, usually:

• Your product or features page, linking to each use case.
• Your blog index or a topic page, linking to posts on that theme.
• A comparisons or alternatives page, linking to each "X vs Y" or "X alternative."
• A tools or resources page, if you have free tools.

On LaunchRanked the hubs are obvious: free tools, the directory list, comparisons, alternatives and the glossary. Each links down to every page in its family, and each page links back up.

That's what people mean by a topic cluster. You don't need the jargon. You need every page to belong somewhere.

Rule 2: three links out, one link in

For every article or guide:

• At least three internal links out, to pages a reader of this page would actually want next.
• At least one internal link in, from an older, relevant page, added the day you publish.

The "three out" rule came from the writer contract we use on Versely: every article has to include at least three internal links before it can ship. We check it automatically, and drafts that fail don't publish.

The "one in" rule is the one people forget. New posts link to old ones naturally, because the old ones exist. Old posts never link to new ones unless you go back and add it. So when you publish, open the two most related older pages and add a sentence that links to the new one.

Rule 3: anchor text that describes the page

Google's guidance on anchor text: "Good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it's on and to the page it links to." It warns against generic phrases like "click here" and "read more," and against cramming in keywords: "Write as naturally as possible."

In practice:

The middle column tells both the reader and Google what's on the other side. You don't need the exact target keyword every time. Varied, natural wording reads better and looks less engineered. Our glossary entry on anchor text goes a little deeper.

Rule 4: link where the reader needs it

The most useful internal link sits in the sentence where the reader has the question. "If your pages aren't getting indexed, check the Page indexing report" is a better place for a link than a "Related posts" box at the bottom.

Related-post boxes, breadcrumbs, navigation and footers are fine. They're crawlable links, and breadcrumbs give every page a path back to its hub. But they repeat across the site and say little about how two specific pages relate. Body links carry the context.

A quick test: if you removed the link, would the sentence still make the reader want to go there? If yes, the link is in the right place.

The monthly check: find orphans

An orphan is a page with no internal links pointing to it. It still exists, it may even be in your sitemap, but nothing on your site says it matters.

Once a month:

1. List your indexable URLs. Your sitemap is the easiest source. Our sitemap checker lists them and flags broken ones.
2. Check internal links per page. The internal half of Search Console's Links report shows how many internal links each page gets. It's a sample, but on a small site it's usually enough to spot the bottom of the list.
3. Fix the bottom ten. For each page with zero or one internal link, either link it from a relevant hub and one related article, or ask whether it should exist at all.

That last question matters. Some orphans are orphans because nobody, including you, can think of where they belong. Those are often thin or duplicated pages. Merge them or noindex them. We explain when in programmatic SEO without getting deindexed.

Mistakes we see on small sites

Linking every mention of a keyword. Five links to the same page in one post help nobody. Link it once, where it's most useful.

Linking only to the homepage and pricing. Commercial pages matter, but a guide that only links to "Sign up" reads as an ad. Link to the next useful thing, and let the product pages be one of them.

Broken internal links after a slug change. Change a URL, and every internal link to it now goes through a redirect or a 404. Update the links, and keep a 301 for outside links. Our redirect checker shows the chain.

Links that aren't real links. Google says it can only reliably follow <a> elements with an href. A button with a JavaScript click handler isn't a crawlable link. Our heading checker and meta tag checker won't catch this, but viewing the page source will.

nofollow on internal links. There's no good reason to tell Google not to follow a link to your own page. If you don't want a page indexed, noindex it instead. Our post on dofollow vs nofollow covers what those attributes do.

How it scales

This system works up to a few hundred pages by hand. Past that, you want it enforced in code: generate hub pages from the same data as the pages they list, add "related" links from shared tags or categories, and block publishing when an article has fewer than three internal links.

That's what we did on Versely when it grew to thousands of URLs, and it's one of the quality gates in Autopilot, where an internal-link check runs before any article ships.

On a small site, you don't need any of that yet. You need four rules and one calendar reminder. Start with your five oldest posts: give each one a link to something newer. That's today's work done.