This is not a treatise on internal links and assumes that you’re already familiar with how internal links benefit a site’s SEO.
That said…
When most people think of internal linking, the thought process is relatively simple: place internal links on pages that have logical topical relevance to other pages.
That’s by no means wrong, but if you don’t go a little bit further, you are leaving a lot of link equity on the table. Instead of thinking of every link equally, we should think of links in terms of their potential value in the eyes of search engines.
In short, the mistake that many people make is not taking PageRank into account when placing internal links.
That may seem too obvious to highlight, but try to identify this pattern in any number of sites, and you’ll see that it is pervasive. The vast majority of sites (if they have optimized internal links at all) only optimize for topical relevance and anchor text relevance.
Here’s a simple way to supercharge your internal linking with the categorization of power pages.
The Concept of Power Pages
Power pages in this context are just content-rich pages that attract significant backlinks on your site. The more backlinks, the better.
The quintessential power page on any site is its homepage, as it naturally receives the most backlinks.
I won’t go too deeply into the PageRank algorithm here, but it’s enough to know that PageRank is iterative: a page’s importance is determined by the importance of the pages that link to it, and that importance is passed on when that page links elsewhere. A link from a page that has accumulated a lot of external backlinks carries significantly more weight than a link from a page that has none. The difference is not marginal.
This is why power pages matter for internal linking. When a power page links to another page on your site, it transfers a disproportionate share of its accumulated authority. When it does not, that authority just sits there doing nothing for the pages you actually want to rank.
How To Find Your Power Pages
Now that we’ve defined power pages, it should be pretty straightforward to find them on your site.
All you really need to do is identify which pages on the site receive the most backlinks. Of course, you don’t want to be too liberal about how far apart two pages are topically, but the PageRank ought to be the priority.
The most reliable method to find backlinks to your site that Google recognizes is to use the Links report in Google Search Console.
This report is not perfectly accurate (no report is at any given time). However, you can be confident that the links reported are “recognized” by Google’s systems.
Another option is to utilize various SEM tools, such as Ahrefs or Semrush, which offer detailed backlink reporting.
Once you’ve found the power pages you want to work with, it’s a matter of deciding which pages make good candidates for the ones you want to boost.
Choosing The Right Power Pages
Not every power page on your site is going to be a useful candidate. There are a few things worth checking before you start adding links.
The first is topical relevance.
A link from a page that has nothing to do with your destination page is not worthless, but you are leaving signal quality on the table. As a general rule, the candidate page should be related enough to the destination that a reader following the link would not be surprised to land there.
The second factor is how many links the candidate page already has in its body copy.
There are two reasons for this.
The first is that too many links weaken the structural signals that links send. This has been know experimentally for a very long time and was confirmed as early as 2021 by John Mueller on behalf of Google’s search team.
The other reason is the way PageRank works. At least in the iteration that we know publicly, the links on a page each receive a share of that page’s PageRank (or whatever you want to call the equivalent of PageRank these days). So even if that split isn’t even, there’s an incentive to err on the side of caution. The more exits there are, the less equity passes through any single one. If a page is already heavily linked, it is usually better to move on to the next candidate.
The third factor to review before selecting a candidate page is whether the page already links to your destination. If it does, adding another link from the same page gives you almost nothing, and we can thank Cyrus Shepard for providing evidence for this, although he has a few tricks that allow you to get away with linking to the same page more than once.
In short, you want net new links from pages that are not already pointing to your destination page.
Where To Place The Link
Once you have a candidate page, placement matters more than most people assume.
The general principle is simple: the higher up the page the link appears, the better. Aim for the first third of the body copy. A link buried in the final paragraph of a long article is doing considerably less work than the same link placed in the opening section.
The reason for this goes beyond crawl priority, though that is part of it. Google’s reasonable surfer model, outlined in a patent filed as early as 2004, is the more instructive explanation.
The patent describes a model in which not all links on a page are treated as equally likely to be followed. Links that a real user would be more likely to click, based on their position, context, and prominence, are assigned a higher probability of being followed, and therefore pass more PageRank. This is, however, speculative so take it with a grain of salt. No hard evidence is provided here, only personal experience of outcomes.
The patent puts it plainly: “when a surfer accesses a document with a set of links, the surfer will follow some of the links with higher probability than others.” It gives obvious examples of low-probability links: terms of service, banner advertisements, links unrelated to the document. But the implication runs the other way, too.
A link that appears early in a relevant article, in a context where a reader would plausibly want to follow it, is treated as more likely to be clicked, and is therefore worth more.
This is not a technicality. It reflects something real about how users actually behave on a page, and Google’s model is designed to approximate that behaviour. Placing a link high on the page in a genuinely relevant context is not just good for crawlability. It is how you signal to Google that the link is one a reasonable person would follow.
One link per candidate page to the same destination is enough. There is no meaningful benefit to adding a second. I mentioned that in the previous section but reiterating it here.
Further Optimization
There are many other things to consider about internal link placement.
Entities in anchor texts, variations in the href attributes, the length of anchor texts, and many others.
That’s outside of the scope of this guide as there are way too many to cover in this short space. You can use some of the resources linked to in the guide and you can also check out our founder’s free video lesson on internal linking here.
Conclusion
If you’re already optimizing your internal links, this is just one more consideration in the process.
If you aren’t, the best time to start is right now.
Starting from your strongest pages, rather than just the most topically convenient ones, is what separates a link placement that does meaningful work from one that is technically present but largely inert.
That distinction is easy to overlook because both approaches look identical on the surface. The link is there either way. But the underlying logic is different, and over time, across a full site, the cumulative difference in equity distribution is significant.
