Links between pages on your own site — they give crawlers a path and let authority flow.
Internal links do two quiet, critical jobs: they give crawlers a route to your pages, and they let authority flow through your site. A page nothing links to internally is orphaned and cut off from your site's strength.
Unlike backlinks, internal links are not a volume game. Authority is finite — each page splits the strength it has across all the links leaving it, so adding more links dilutes each one. Internal linking is about relevance and hierarchy: link from related, higher-authority pages to the pages you want to lift, and don't stuff a page with links just to have more. A handful of deliberate, relevant links beats a wall of them.
When you publish or fix a page, ask what existing pages should link to it and what it should link out to. Strong internal linking is one of the most underused levers in SEO because it's invisible until you map it — which is exactly what the CommandSEO canvas does.
What to do about it
For an important page, find 3–5 related, already-strong pages and link to it from them with descriptive anchor text — not 'click here.' Quality and relevance of the linking page matter more than the number of links.
Fix orphans first: any page with no internal links pointing to it can't be reached or strengthened. Then prune obvious clutter — mega-menus and footers that link to everything spread authority thin.
Common questions
Backlinks — the more the better. Internal links — not?
Mostly, with a caveat on each. Backlinks (external sites → you): more good ones is better, but not raw count. One link from a respected, relevant site beats a thousand from spammy or irrelevant ones — and low-quality links can actively hurt you, because an unnatural link profile reads as manipulation. So it's 'more good ones,' not 'more.' Internal links (you → you) aren't a volume game at all: a page's authority is split across its outgoing links, so stuffing more dilutes each one and looks spammy. Internal linking is about relevance and hierarchy, not count.
Can I have too many internal links on a page?
Only if the extra links are irrelevant. Relevant internal links are good — most sites have too few, not too many, so don't hold back on linking to genuinely related pages. The catch is that a page's authority is shared across every link leaving it, so links to unrelated pages just dilute the ones that matter. So the rule isn't 'fewer links' — it's 'only relevant links.' Add every link that helps the reader; skip the ones added just to pad the count.