Internal Links vs External Backlinks
Internal linking is the one part of this subject entirely within your control. It is free, it takes effect quickly and nobody has to agree to it. It is also routinely neglected by businesses paying substantial sums for the part that is none of those things.
The Difference
An internal link connects one page of your website to another page of the same website. An external backlink comes from somebody else's website and points at yours. Both are links in the ordinary sense. Almost everything else about them is different.
There is a third kind worth naming so the picture is complete. An outbound external link goes from your site to somebody else's. That is the same object as somebody else's backlink, viewed from the other end.
So three relationships involve your website. Links you make between your own pages, which you control completely. Links you make to other people, which you also control. And links other people make to you, which you do not control at all.
Set out that way, an obvious question follows. Two of those three categories are entirely within your gift, cost nothing and can be changed this afternoon. The third requires other people to decide something. Which do most businesses spend their money on? The links themselves are defined in what backlinks are. The full series sits in the complete guide to backlink building.
What Each One Does
They are not competing versions of the same thing. They do separate jobs. A site needs both.
What external backlinks do. They bring standing in from outside. Somebody unconnected to you decided your page was worth referencing, which is evidence no amount of your own effort can manufacture. They also corroborate that your business is real and send actual visitors.
What internal links do. Four things. They help pages be discovered, since a search engine following links through your site finds what those links lead to. They describe what a page is about, through the wording and the surrounding context. They signal which of your pages you consider important, because a page referenced from many others is evidently one you think matters. And they move standing around the site.
The distinction that makes the whole subject clear is this. External links bring value to your website. Internal links decide where it goes once it has arrived.
Which means the two are sequential rather than alternative. A site with strong external references and no internal structure has value arriving at a front door and stopping there. A site with excellent internal structure and no external references distributes very little around a well organised building. Neither works alone.
Why Internal Linking Is Neglected
Consider the two activities side by side. Internal linking is free, immediate, entirely within your control and requires nobody's permission. External link building costs money, takes months, depends on decisions other people make and cannot be guaranteed.
Businesses overwhelmingly buy the second and neglect the first. The reasons are commercial rather than technical. They are worth naming, because naming them is what breaks the pattern.
Nobody sells it. There is no internal linking package, because there is no recurring revenue in a job that largely gets finished. An agency proposing a month of internal linking is proposing to solve a problem and stop billing for it.
It produces no artefact. A link campaign generates a list of placements to put in a report. Internal linking generates a slightly better website, which cannot be presented as an achievement in the same way.
It requires knowing the content. Doing it properly means having read the site and understanding which pages relate to which. That is harder to resource than sending outreach. It does not scale, either.
It sounds too basic to matter. The word internal makes it sound like housekeeping. Businesses paying serious money for authority find it hard to believe the same result was partly available by rearranging their own pages.
How Authority Moves Around A Site
At concept level rather than as a formula, since nobody outside Google knows the mechanics and anybody offering you a calculation is inventing it.
A page that receives external references accumulates some standing. That page then passes a portion of it onward through the links it contains. Those pages pass some further on again. Standing therefore flows through a site along the paths its internal links create.
Three consequences follow. All three are actionable.
Orphan pages receive nothing. A page nothing links to internally sits outside the network. The site can be strong overall while that page remains disconnected from all of it. This is common on older sites, where pages are published and then quietly stop being referenced.
Your strongest pages should point onward. Whichever pages have attracted external references are the ones with something to distribute. If those pages link nowhere useful, the value stops with them.
Coverage should be connected to commerce. This is the practical one. A business earns coverage. The coverage points at a guide or a news item. That page then links nowhere in particular. The reference arrives and goes no further. That page should reference the commercial page a reader would want next, which costs one sentence.
Anchor Text Internally
Internal anchor text is the exact inverse of external anchor text, which is why advice about one keeps getting misapplied to the other.
Externally, a business specifying the wording is a warning sign, because a publisher describing your page in their own prose would never choose a phrase that reads like a search query. Internally the opposite holds. You are the publisher. Choosing accurate, descriptive wording is simply describing your own site properly. Declining to do so is not restraint but vagueness.
What sensible internal anchor text looks like. It describes the destination, so a reader knows what they will get. It varies naturally, because different sentences need different phrasings and you are writing sentences rather than filling slots. It reads as part of the prose rather than as an insertion.
What to avoid. Click here and read more, which describe nothing. The identical commercial phrase repeated in every reference across the site, which reads as mechanical because it is. Whole sentences turned into links, which obscures what the link is actually about. And links whose wording promises something the destination does not deliver.
The test is the one used throughout this cluster. Would a reader arriving at that wording understand where it goes and want to follow it? If yes, the wording is right, whatever it does or does not contain.
Common Internal Linking Mistakes
Every one of these is within your control, which makes them the cheapest problems in this entire cluster to solve.
Orphan pages. Pages nothing links to. List your pages, then check which are referenced from anywhere other than a sitemap. The findings usually surprise people.
Navigation only linking. All internal links coming from menus, headers and footers, with none inside the writing. Template links treat every page identically and say nothing about relationships between them.
Everything pointing at the homepage. The page that needs help least receives the most references, while the pages competing for terms receive none.
Identical wording everywhere. The same phrase used for every reference to a page, which is what happens when linking is treated as a mechanical task rather than as writing.
Links added for their own sake. Referencing pages a reader has no reason to want, because somebody decided more links were better. It annoys readers and dilutes the references that matter.
Important pages buried deep. Commercial pages sitting several clicks from anywhere anybody arrives. If reaching a page requires four deliberate steps, both readers and crawlers will reach it less often.
Doing This Before Buying Links
The case for order of operations, which is the practical point of this entire page.
External links deliver value into a structure. If that structure cannot distribute it, because the pages that receive references link nowhere useful and the pages that need help are orphaned, then value arrives and stops. You are paying to fill a container that leaks.
Consider the arithmetic from a business's point of view. Fixing internal linking on a modest site is a few days of somebody's attention at most. Then it is done. A link programme is a recurring cost over quarters with uncertain outcomes. Doing the second while neglecting the first means buying the expensive uncertain thing while leaving the cheap certain thing undone.
There is also a diagnostic benefit that gets overlooked. A business that fixes its internal structure first, then waits, learns something useful either way. If visibility improves, the structure was the constraint and no links were needed. If nothing changes, at least the external references bought afterwards will actually reach the pages they were meant to help.
This belongs to the same argument as our guide to when backlinks are not the right SEO investment. Internal structure is one of the constraints that page describes. It is the one most easily mistaken for an authority problem.
We fix the free part
before selling the rest.
Internal structure, orphan pages and the route from earned coverage to commercial pages are all inside the monthly fee, because there is no sense paying for references that arrive somewhere and stop.
Included every month:
One fixed monthly rate. No setup fee. No price per link.
Twenty four guides.
One subject.
This page covers the part you control. The rest of the series covers what makes an external reference valuable, how they are earned, what a metric is worth and when none of it is the right spend.
