Internal Links Beat Backlinks
(For Most Sites)

In the year two thousand and twenty-five, in a modest office building whose exterior suggested nothing so much as a filing cabinet that had achieved consciousness and immediately regretted it, there sat a marketing director named... but no, the name is of no consequence, for his name was legion, and his affliction universal, and his mustache (for he had one, thin and apologetic, the color of weak tea left overnight on a windowsill) trembled with an anxiety that had become so familiar to him that he had ceased to notice it, much as one ceases to notice the particular smell of one's own apartment, which to visitors registers as an overwhelming miasma of microwaved fish and existential defeat.

This marketing director (let us call him Petrovich, though he was not Russian, nor particularly Petrovichian in demeanor, but the name suits the cut of his jacket, which was brown, and slightly too large, as if purchased in anticipation of a prosperity that had failed to materialize), this Petrovich had spent the morning, as he spent every morning, staring at a spreadsheet that purported to measure his website's "backlink profile," a phrase that, when spoken aloud, produced in him a sensation not unlike that of biting into an apple and discovering it to be made of compressed sawdust.

The Great Backlink Delusion

The backlink, dear reader (and I address you directly now, for you are complicit in this madness, yes you, with your "link building campaigns" and your "outreach strategies" and your face, your particular face, which I can see even now, illuminated by the glow of a monitor displaying a rejection email from a website you had never heard of until you were instructed to beg it for a link), the backlink has achieved in our time a status not unlike that of relics in the medieval church: objects of veneration whose power is inversely proportional to their abundance, and whose procurement has spawned an entire economy of fraudsters, middlemen, and sincere believers whose sincerity makes them most pitiable of all.

But here is the secret that the link building industrial complex does not want you to know: you are sitting atop a mountain of link equity that you control completely, that costs you nothing, that works demonstrably and immediately, and that you have almost certainly neglected with a thoroughness that borders on the heroic.

I speak, of course, of internal links.

A Digression Concerning the Nature of Wealth

Consider the peasant who owns a modest farm (perhaps forty acres, perhaps fifty, the precise acreage is immaterial, what matters is that it is his), and who spends his days not tending this farm but rather wandering the countryside asking wealthy landowners if they might, in their infinite generosity, drop a single coin into his hat. "I need external currency," he explains to anyone who will listen, which is no one, because everyone can see that his own fields lie fallow, choked with weeds, the irrigation channels clogged with the accumulated debris of his neglect. "My own farm produces only internal currency," he continues, "which, as everyone knows, is worth less than external currency."

This peasant is you. Your website is the farm. Your internal links are the crops you refuse to plant. The backlinks you pursue are the coins you beg from strangers while your own soil (rich, fertile, responsive to the slightest cultivation) lies untouched.

At this point, a reader of skeptical disposition (and I can see you there, with your crossed arms and your "show me the data" expression, an expression I have grown to recognize as the particular physiognomy of those who have been wounded by hope too many times) might object: "But surely backlinks are more powerful than internal links! The entire SEO industry says so!"

To which I respond: the entire SEO industry also says you need to optimize for E-E-A-T, which is made up. The entire SEO industry will sell you tools that repackage your own data. The entire SEO industry has a financial interest in convincing you that the solution to your problems lies outside your control, in the hands of services that only they can provide.

What Internal Links Actually Do

Let us speak plainly, if only for a moment, before returning to the baroque convolutions that this subject demands.

Internal links distribute PageRank within your site. The page that receives the most internal links from your most important pages will, all else being equal, rank better. This is not theory. This is not speculation. This is how the algorithm works, and Google has said so, repeatedly, in documentation that nobody reads because reading documentation is less exciting than purchasing another link building tool.

Internal links help Google discover and understand your content. A page with no internal links pointing to it is, in the eyes of the crawler, a page you have deliberately hidden, a page you are ashamed of, a page that exists in a state of existential isolation not unlike that of a bureaucrat who has been transferred to a department that consists entirely of himself and a broken photocopier.

Internal links establish topical relationships. When you link from your main guide to your supporting articles, you are telling Google "these pages belong together, they form a coherent whole, they are not merely a collection of words thrown at a wall in the hope that something might stick."

And here is the part that should make you weep: you control all of this. Every word of anchor text. Every destination page. Every click of potential that currently languishes in your navigation footer, that hides in your orphaned blog posts, that sits dormant in articles that link to nothing and receive links from nothing and exist in a state of digital purgatory that would make Dante reach for his quill.

The Anatomy of Neglect

I have audited websites (hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, the precise number dissolves into a blur of similar horrors), and I can tell you with the confidence of a coroner who has seen too many bodies that most sites have catastrophically bad internal linking.

The symptoms are always the same:

Orphan pages. Content that exists but receives zero internal links. These pages are detectable only by Google's crawler stumbling upon them accidentally, like a tourist who takes a wrong turn in Naples and finds himself in a neighborhood that does not appear on any map and from which no tourist has ever returned.

Thin link profiles on important pages. Your product pages, your service pages, the pages that actually make you money, linked to once from the navigation and then abandoned, like children left at the door of an orphanage by parents who could not afford the responsibility of proper site architecture.

Generic anchor text. "Click here." "Learn more." "Read this." These phrases tell Google nothing, convey no topical relevance, and represent a squandering of opportunity so complete that it achieves a kind of perverse majesty, like setting fire to money not out of protest but simply because you forgot that money was flammable.

Navigation-only linking. Every page links to every other page through the same navigation menu, which means no page is more important than any other page, which means Google must guess at your priorities, and Google, I assure you, is not interested in guessing correctly. Google is interested in serving results that keep users on Google, a distinction that too many website owners fail to grasp.

A Practical Interlude

Let us descend, briefly, from the empyrean heights of rhetoric to the muddy plains of actionable advice:

Identify your most important pages. These are the pages you want to rank. If you do not know which pages these are, you have larger problems than internal linking, problems that require a degree of self-examination that no article can provide.

Count the internal links pointing to each important page. You can do this with Screaming Frog, or with Sitebulb, or with the crawling tool of your choice, or, if you prefer, you can do it manually, clicking through your own site like a visitor who has lost their way and is too proud to ask for directions.

Compare this number to your less important pages. If your blog post about your company's holiday party has more internal links than your primary service page, you have discovered the problem. The solution is not to delete the holiday party post (though you should consider it) but to add internal links from your content to your money pages.

Use descriptive anchor text. If the page is about "enterprise SEO consulting," link to it with anchor text that includes those words or close variants. This is not keyword stuffing. This is telling Google what the page is about. The distinction is lost on those who have been trained to fear optimization, but I assure you the distinction exists.

Create content specifically to support your important pages. Write articles that naturally lead to your service pages. Build resource hubs that establish your site as the definitive source on topics related to what you sell. This is not manipulation; this is architecture. The building does not apologize for having a foundation.

Why Backlinks Are Overrated (For Most Sites)

I can hear the objection forming in your throat, a bubbling protest that rises like dyspepsia after a meal of dubious provenance: "But backlinks are the currency of authority! Without backlinks, I cannot rank!"

To which I must say: you are probably wrong, and your wrongness is expensive.

Most sites do not have a backlink problem. They have a content problem, or an internal linking problem, or a site architecture problem, or a "the content is not actually useful" problem. But they do not have a backlink problem. They have been told they have a backlink problem by people who sell solutions to backlink problems, which is like being told by a surgeon that you need surgery: perhaps true, perhaps profitable for the surgeon, but worthy of a second opinion.

The backlinks that matter are mostly unobtainable. The link from the New York Times. The mention in a peer-reviewed journal. The organic citation from a genuine authority in your field. These links cannot be purchased, cannot be outreached, cannot be guest-posted into existence. They come from being genuinely noteworthy, which is a quality that no amount of "link building strategy" can manufacture.

The backlinks you can actually get are mostly worthless. The guest post on a site that exists only to host guest posts. The "niche edit" in an article that nobody reads. The HARO link that three hundred other people are also competing for, each of them crafting the same "helpful expert quote" in the hope that a journalist will choose their particular arrangement of words over the two hundred ninety-nine other arrangements that are functionally identical.

The expected value of most link building is negative. You spend time, or money, or both, pursuing links that either never materialize or materialize on sites so obscure that their linking to you is less an endorsement than an embarrassment, like receiving a letter of recommendation from someone who has been in prison for mail fraud.

The Return of Petrovich

Let us return to our friend Petrovich, whom we left staring at his backlink spreadsheet in his too-large jacket with his trembling mustache. What has Petrovich been doing these past months? He has been:

Sending emails to websites asking for links (response rate: 0.3%)

Paying for guest posts on sites whose "Domain Authority" is suspiciously high given that they appear to have no actual readers

Participating in link exchanges that violate Google's guidelines and will eventually result in penalties that Petrovich will blame on "algorithm updates"

Attending webinars about "advanced link building strategies" that are neither advanced nor strategies but are certainly link building in the sense that they build links to the websites of the webinar hosts

Meanwhile (and here is where the tragedy becomes comedy, or the comedy becomes tragedy, the distinction having long since ceased to matter), Petrovich's website contains four hundred and seventeen blog posts that link to nothing except the homepage. His most important service page receives exactly three internal links, all from the navigation menu. His site architecture resembles not so much a planned structure as the aftermath of an explosion in a content factory, articles scattered across the domain like debris, each one isolated, each one alone, each one crying out for the connections that would give it meaning and power.

Petrovich could, in a single afternoon, restructure his internal linking and achieve more ranking improvement than six months of outreach has produced. But he will not do this. He will not do this because internal linking is not glamorous, because it does not involve "relationship building" or "digital PR" or any of the other euphemisms that make link begging sound like a respectable profession. He will not do this because fixing your own house is less exciting than trying to move into someone else's mansion.

Petrovich will continue sending emails. The emails will continue to be ignored. The mustache will continue to tremble.

A Final Word

I am not saying backlinks do not matter. Backlinks matter. For highly competitive queries, backlinks may be the deciding factor. For sites that have already optimized everything else, backlinks may be the only lever left to pull.

But you have not optimized everything else. You have not even looked at everything else. You have been so busy staring at the horizon, dreaming of the links that might come from out there, that you have not noticed the fertile soil beneath your feet, the soil that is yours, that has always been yours, that will produce exactly the harvest you plant.

Internal links are not a consolation prize. They are not the thing you do when you have given up on "real" link building. They are, for most sites, for most queries, for most purposes, more impactful and more achievable than any backlink campaign you will ever run.

Fix your internal linking. Map your site architecture. Connect your content to your money pages. Do this before you send another outreach email, before you pay for another guest post, before you attend another webinar about strategies that work for everyone except you.

And if you do all this and still find yourself needing backlinks, well, then you will have earned the right to pursue them. You will pursue them from a position of strength, with a site that is already optimized, already coherent, already worthy of the links it seeks.

But you will probably find you do not need them. You will probably find that the farm produces enough, that the internal currency spends just fine, that the mountain of equity you were sitting on all along was sufficient for your purposes.

You will probably find that Petrovich could have saved himself a great deal of trouble.

You control internal links completely. They cost nothing. They work. The question is not whether to pursue them instead of backlinks; the question is why you haven't already.