When it comes to the ranking of a website, your on-page and off-page SEO will play the most significant role. SEO is a vast concept including various tactics that can improve the way search engines see your website. Crosslinking is one of these tactics. In this article, we’ll showcase a couple of SEO Cross-Linking Tips to give you a hand of help in your rankings.
What Is Cross-Linking?
In SEO, the links your website receives will play an important part in your success. Search engines follow links around the web from other websites in order to update their database of web pages. Without links from other sites, you will not be able to rank high.
Receiving links is something mostly outside of your control zone. However, the internal links present on your website are fully controllable. By cross-linking between your posts and pages you can signal search engines the hierarchy of your website’s content.
If you post a new article, it will have no links pointing to it in the beginning. If you’re not linking to that article, search engines will never know of its existence. Thus, cross-linking plays an essential role.
Internal links do three separate jobs at once, and it helps to keep them apart in your head. They are a discovery mechanism: a crawler that never finds a link to a URL has to rely on your sitemap alone. They are a relevance signal: the words you wrap around a link describe the destination. And they are a priority signal: the pages you point at most often, from the most prominent places, are the ones you are telling search engines to treat as important. A good cross-linking plan does all three deliberately instead of by accident.
How to Do It
When it comes to cross-linking, you can either leave things to chance or, you can apply some solid SEO Cross-Linking Tips to boost your organic traffic.
Use a Structure
The pages with the highest amount of internal and external backlinks should always be your most important ones. Ideally, you should always link from your individual posts to your website’s categories or sections. From those categories, you then have to link to the homepage. The homepage should be the one with the highest page rank and link value.
Besides categories and homepages, your cornerstone content should also have a solid amount of backlinks. You must link from articles and categories to your core content if you want to make it stand out.
Do-Follow and No-Follow Links
Although links are of great importance, not all links are created equal. Do-Follow links are those that you want to receive from other sites or use when linking internally. A Do-Follow link will tell search engine crawlers to follow the link to your page, passing some link juice to you in the process.
A No-Follow link will tell the crawlers exactly the opposite, passing no link juice onto the linked website. You should avoid using this kind of links when doing cross-linking with pages that you care about. No-Follow links have their role as well; they are perfect for linking to a site, without associating yourself with it.
Two updates are worth knowing here, because a lot of older advice on this topic is out of date. First, since March 2020 Google treats rel="nofollow" as a hint rather than a strict directive, and it added two companion values: rel="sponsored" for paid or affiliate links and rel="ugc" for user-generated content such as comments and forum posts. Second, adding nofollow to your own internal links in order to “sculpt” where value flows has not worked since Google changed how it distributes link value back in 2009 — the value attached to a nofollowed internal link is simply lost rather than redistributed to the remaining links. The practical takeaway is unchanged, but for a better reason: leave your internal links normal, and control importance through which pages you link to and how often, not through link attributes.
Contextual Links
As mentioned above, not all types of links are created equal. Contextual links with a relevant anchor text have more benefits, for example than random links followed by irrelevant anchor texts.
If you’re covering a similar topic in multiple articles you should crosslink them with each other. This way you will be able to tell search engines that your articles are related from a topic point of view. The anchor text you’re using for the link should fit naturally in your article. Also, make sure you don’t overuse a specific anchor text or you might get penalized by search engines.
Keep Your Most Important Pages Within Three Clicks
A structure only helps if it is shallow. Click depth is the number of clicks needed to reach a page starting from the homepage, and it is one of the clearest signals of how important you consider that page to be. Pages sitting five or six clicks deep get crawled less often, and on large sites some of them never get crawled at all.
A workable rule: anything that earns money, leads or subscribers should be reachable in three clicks or fewer from the homepage. Category and hub pages do most of that work. If a page can only be reached through pagination — page seven of a blog archive, for example — it is effectively invisible, and it needs a contextual link from somewhere prominent.
The same logic applies to orphan pages: URLs with no internal links pointing at them at all. They usually appear when someone publishes outside the normal workflow, when a category gets deleted, or after a migration. If a URL sits in your XML sitemap but nothing on the site links to it, treat that as a bug, not a stylistic choice.
Link From Your Strongest Pages, Not Only From New Ones
Most people add internal links in one direction only: they publish a new article and link out from it to older ones. That helps readers navigate, but it does very little for the new article, because a page nobody links to has nothing to pass along.
The higher-value move is the opposite one. After publishing, go back to three to five existing pages that already attract links and traffic, and add a contextual link from those pages to the new one. Established pages are usually recrawled more frequently, so a link placed there tends to be discovered sooner than one buried in a brand-new URL.
You can find those pages without paying for anything: the Links report in Google Search Console lists your top internally linked pages and your top externally linked pages, and the Performance report tells you which URLs actually earn clicks. The overlap between those two lists is your internal linking equity, and it is where new links do the most work.
Point Every Internal Link at the Final URL
Internal links are the one part of your link profile you can keep perfectly clean, so keep it clean. Every internal link should point at a URL that returns HTTP 200 — not at a redirect, not at a chain of redirects, and never at a 404.
Redirects do work, but each hop adds latency for the visitor and costs crawl requests you would rather spend elsewhere. They also multiply over time: an old http:// link becomes an HTTPS redirect, which later becomes a trailing-slash redirect, which later points at a slug you renamed. After any migration or slug change, run a crawl and update the source links directly instead of asking the redirect to live forever.
Two more mechanical details are worth checking. Link with a real <a href="..."> element pointing at a resolvable URL — links built only from JavaScript click handlers, buttons or styled <span> elements may never be followed. And prefer absolute HTTPS URLs, so the same markup behaves identically when your content is cached, syndicated or pulled into a feed.
A Step-by-Step Cross-Linking Workflow
Cross-linking works best as a repeatable routine rather than a one-off cleanup. Here is a workflow you can run on a site of any size; on a small site it takes an afternoon.
- Crawl your own site. Any crawler will do — Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, or the site audit modules inside Ahrefs and Semrush. Export every internal link with its source URL, destination URL, anchor text, status code and click depth.
- Write down your priority pages. Ten to twenty URLs at most: the service or product pages that generate revenue, plus the cornerstone articles you want to rank for your head terms. If everything is a priority, nothing is.
- Group the rest into topic clusters. Each cluster gets one hub page and a set of supporting articles that answer narrower questions around it. A spreadsheet with two columns — URL and cluster — is enough.
- Find the gaps. Sort the crawl by inbound internal links ascending: zero means orphan, one or two usually means the page is only linked from an archive. Then sort by click depth descending to see what is buried.
- Link supporting pages to their hub, and the hub back to each of them. This is the core of the exercise. Every supporting article should link up to the hub with a descriptive anchor; the hub should link down to every article in its cluster.
- Add sideways links between siblings, but only where they help. Two articles in the same cluster should link to each other when one genuinely answers a question the other raises. Linking every page to every other page dilutes the signal and reads like spam.
- Fix the anchors you already have. Search your content for “click here”, “read more”, “this article” and bare URLs, and replace them with wording that describes the destination.
- Re-crawl and log the date. Keep a simple change log of what you linked and when. Without it you cannot tell, two months later, whether the movement you are seeing came from your links or from something else entirely.
Anchor Text That Earns Its Place
Anchor text is the cheapest relevance signal available to you, and on internal links you control every single instance of it. The goal is wording that would still make sense if the link were removed and the sentence read out loud. Descriptive anchors also help people using screen readers, who often navigate a page by jumping through its list of links — a list of twelve entries all reading “read more” is useless to them.
| Weak anchor | Better anchor | Why it is better |
|---|---|---|
| click here | our internal linking checklist | Describes the destination instead of the action. |
| read more | how editorial link building works | Gives both the reader and the crawler a topic. |
| https://example.com/guide/ | the technical SEO audit guide | A bare URL carries no keyword meaning and reads badly. |
| the same exact-match phrase on 40 pages | a mix of natural phrasings around the same topic | Repetition at scale looks manufactured rather than editorial. |
| a whole sentence turned into a link | the two to five words that name the topic | Keeps the signal focused and the paragraph readable. |
One nuance that trips people up: when a page contains two links to the same destination, do not assume both anchors count. Treat the first link to any given URL — the one highest in the main content — as the one that matters, and make its anchor the descriptive one. Navigation and footer links are usually the earliest links on the page, which is another reason to keep contextual links inside the body copy where they can carry meaning.
How Many Internal Links Should a Page Have?
There is no official number. Google’s old “keep it under 100 links per page” guidance was removed from its documentation years ago; it dated from a period when the crawler truncated very large files, not from any ranking rule. Instead of counting, apply criteria:
- Does the link answer a question the reader has at that exact point? If yes, it belongs there. If you had to bend a sentence to fit it in, it does not.
- Is it in the main content? Contextual links inside the body of an article carry more weight than the same link repeated in a sidebar or footer on every page of the site.
- Is the destination something you actually want to rank? Linking repeatedly to your privacy policy or your author archive spends attention on pages that will never earn you anything.
- Would a reader plausibly click it? Links nobody clicks are still crawlable, but a link placed where readers genuinely need it tends to be the same link a search engine values.
- Does the page still read like prose? If a paragraph has more blue text than black, cut back. Three to eight well-placed contextual links in a long article is a healthy range for most sites.
A Worked Example: Cross-Linking a Small Cluster
Imagine a site with one hub page about link building and four supporting articles. Before any work, the four articles link only to the homepage, and the hub links to nothing. Here is what the finished map looks like:
| Page | Role | Links out to | Receives links from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Link building guide | Hub | All four supporting articles, plus the services page | Homepage, main menu, all four supporting articles |
| Anchor text basics | Supporting | Hub, cross-linking article | Hub, cross-linking article |
| Cross-linking tips | Supporting | Hub, anchor text basics, site structure article | Hub, anchor text basics |
| Site structure and click depth | Supporting | Hub, cross-linking article | Hub, cross-linking article |
| Outreach email templates | Supporting | Hub only | Hub |
Two things are deliberate in that table. The hub is the only page every article links up to, which is how it accumulates the internal authority needed to compete for the broad head term. And the outreach article links sideways to nothing, because its topic does not naturally overlap with the other three — forcing a link there would add a connection that neither readers nor crawlers would find meaningful.
Common Cross-Linking Mistakes
- Relying on automated “related posts” widgets alone. They generate links, but the anchor is usually the post title and the selection is often based on tags rather than genuine relevance.
- Linking only from new content. New pages have the least to give. Push links down from established pages as well.
- Leaving tag archives to do the work. Thin tag pages that exist only to hold links tend to be crawled and then ignored, and they add a click of depth to everything behind them.
- Linking into redirects after a migration. It works until the redirect is removed, and then a whole cluster breaks at once.
- Sending internal links to noindexed or canonicalised URLs. Point at the canonical version instead — the URL you actually want in the index.
- Using identical exact-match anchors site-wide. Varied, natural phrasing describing the same topic is both safer and more useful to readers.
- Forgetting the translated or regional versions of a page. If you run several language versions, cross-link within each language and let hreflang handle the connection between them.
- Never auditing again. Internal link structures decay quietly as posts are deleted, merged and re-slugged.
How to Tell Whether It Worked
Internal linking rarely produces an overnight jump, so measure it over four to eight weeks and compare the same metrics before and after. Four checks cover most of what you need:
- Indexing. In the Google Search Console Pages report, watch the “Discovered — currently not indexed” and “Crawled — currently not indexed” buckets. URLs that move out of those groups after you added links to them are the clearest evidence that discovery was the bottleneck.
- Impressions and average position. Filter the Performance report to the specific URL you linked to and compare the period after your change with the equivalent period before it. Impressions usually move before clicks do.
- Internal link counts. Re-run the crawl and confirm the target pages actually gained the links you intended — templates and caching plugins sometimes swallow changes.
- Behaviour. In GA4 you can see landing pages and engagement, and you can add an event for clicks on internal links if you want to know which placements readers really use. Placement beats volume nearly every time.
Be honest about attribution. If you published new content, earned external links and reworked your internal structure in the same month, you will not be able to separate the effects. Change one thing at a time when you can, and keep the change log.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is cross-linking the same as internal linking?
In everyday use, yes: cross-linking usually means linking between the pages and posts of a single website. Some people also use the term for linking between two sites they own, which is a different exercise with different risks — see below.
Can I have too many internal links on one page?
There is no hard limit, but there is a practical one. The more links a page carries, the less each individual link stands out, and a page stuffed with links reads badly. Judge by relevance and readability rather than by a number.
Should internal links ever be nofollow?
Almost never. Nofollow on internal links does not redirect value to your other pages — it discards it. If you do not want a URL crawled or indexed, handle it with robots.txt, a noindex tag or by not linking to it in the first place.
Do menu and footer links count?
They count for discovery and they are essential for navigation, but boilerplate links repeated on every page carry less weight than a contextual link inside the main content. Use the menu for the handful of pages that deserve site-wide prominence, and use body copy for everything else.
How often should I audit my internal links?
Quarterly is enough for a small brochure site. Publishers and shops that add content weekly are better off with a monthly pass, plus a mandatory check after any migration, redesign or bulk slug change.
Should I link between two websites I own?
Only where a real user would benefit, and sparingly. Networks of owned sites built mainly to link at each other fall squarely under Google’s link spam policies. A single, clearly relevant link between two genuine brands is normal; a lattice of reciprocal links between thin sites is a link scheme.
Does internal linking still matter now that people search through AI assistants?
Yes, and for the same reason it always did. Whatever consumes your content — a classic search crawler or an AI system’s retrieval layer — still has to find your URLs, and it finds them by following links and reading sitemaps. Clear structure, descriptive anchors and no orphan pages remain the foundation.
Conclusion
Link Building is one of the most effective processes when it comes to building a strong SEO presence and ranking your website higher in search engine result pages. Cross-linking is the part of link building that is entirely in your control. By using the SEO Cross-Linking Tips mentioned above you can easily boost your rankings and organic traffic.
If you only take one thing away, make it this: pick your ten most important pages, make sure each of them is reachable in three clicks and linked from your strongest existing content with an anchor that describes it, and re-check that list every quarter. It costs nothing but attention, and it is the highest-leverage SEO work most sites are not doing.