Why it matters to a buyer
Unlike backlinks, which depend on other sites' cooperation, internal links are entirely within a business's own control, and they are consistently one of the cheapest, fastest changes an SEO project can make. A buyer should look for how deliberately a site links between related pages: a new important page that is not linked from anywhere else on the site is effectively invisible to both crawlers and visitors, no matter how good the content is.
How it is measured or applied
Internal links are added from established, well-linked pages down to newer or deeper ones, using descriptive anchor text and grouping related content, such as a pillar page linking out to its supporting posts and back again. A site crawl reveals link depth, how many clicks a page is from the homepage, and orphan pages with no internal links pointing to them at all. Internal linking is measured by checking whether important pages sit within a few clicks of the homepage and by watching whether newly linked pages start being crawled and indexed faster.
Sources
- Qualify your outbound links to Google, Google Search Central
