13 Critical Internal Linking Questions Answered (That Every Blogger Asks)

Internal linking is a pretty hot topic when it comes to blogging or content marketing!. There’s a lot of buzz around the topic.

Everybody is curious about this unique ‘SEO hack,’ but I’m going to make you meet the reality in this content piece.

In this post, I’m going to answer all of the internal linking questions every blogger, marketer, or beginner online entrepreneur asks and help you get the most out of your internal linking strategy.

But how am I to answer these questions? Well, I’m have been in the blogging and SEO world for a long time now and have been able to build successful blogs in various different niches/industries.

So, let’s not waste any time further and move on to our important questions. Let’s get right into the post now!

What Is Internal Linking? (With Example)

Internal linking is a practice in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) where a URL of a domain is linked within the content of another URL of the same domain.

If that’s a bit confusing to you, I’ll explain this to you in even more simple words: Internal liking is simply an approach where you link from one page to another of the same website.

A lot of website owners and bloggers link two pages of the same website for a wide variety of reasons. We’ll talk about the reasons later on, but here’s an example of internal linking;

So, for instance, I wrote this post on book affiliate programs recently and found a company common in one of the previous posts that I wrote on some other topic.

If this was the case, why wouldn’t I mention that I did talk about the company in XYZ post, right? And that’s what I did…

This is a good example of internal linking. Not only posts, but you can link any resource on your website from a page to the other.

Is Internal Linking Important?

Internal linking is extremely important for a website as it creates relevance, encourages the user to read other pages of the same domain, provides additional value to the end-user or the visitor, and helps in establishing overall authority to build trust.

Many SEO experts and web admins believe that internal linking is an extremely important strategy to consider, but a lot of publishers are underestimating its power.

Does Internal Linking Hurt SEO?

Internal linking is a great way to help search engines like Google and Bing understand the overall structure of a website, build trustworthiness, and improve rankings but overdoing it can hurt your SEO and signal search engines that you are trying to trick the algorithms.

Be advised that you don’t use the same anchor text over and over while adding internal links to certain pages. This will come across as if you are trying to manipulate the search engines.

There have been a lot of shreds of evidence where internal linking has shown a negative effect on the keywords a website ranks for. Hence, it can make your SEO if done the right way but can break your SEO as well.

How Does Internal Linking Help SEO?

Internal linking helps SEO in the following different ways:

1. Internal linking helps in establishing heirarchy on a website for search engines to crawl all pages on the site
2. Adding internal links passes link juice from one page to another page of a website
3. When you interlink pages, the chances of a visitor viewing other pages to your website increase and ii is a positive signal to search engines
4. Adding internal links assists publishers in optimizing for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness
5. Internal linking helps search engines understand the content of a page to be able to rank it for relevant keywords

As you can see, there are a lot of ways in which internal linking helps SEO. If you are a webmaster, you should definitely take advantage of this strategy to see an increase in your site’s SEO performance.

Does Internal linking Work?

Internal linking is a proven SEO strategy that definitely works. As a matter of fact, it has helped me grow my new blog’s traffic by 20.34%. Webmasters do need to be aware that it can take some time before any significant results or effects.

Being the biggest search engine on the planet, Google has talked about the importance of internal links, and hence, they work for sure.

What Are The Benefits Of Internal Linking?

Adding internal links the right way can be quite beneficial. Here are the following benefits:

1. Internal links help bloggers or website owners increase pageviews
2. A user gets to meet extra value if there are relevant internal links
3. The chances of a visitor coming back to a website increases
4. Search engines are able to crawl the pages easily
5. Adding internal links also helps in boosting rankings
6. Linking landing pages of the same website can skyrocket conversions
7. Topical relevance, website authority, and expertise
8. Some authoritatie pages can pass link juice to less authoritative ones
9. Users spend more time on the website, which is a positive signal to search engines
10. Internal linking can solve indexing issues (especially with Google nowadays)

How Much Internal Linking Is Safe?

Although there’s no clarification provided by major search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo, webmasters should not overdo internal linking as it is going to be a red signal when it comes to SEO.

There’s no limit on internal linking, but as long as the resources you link to on your site are relevant to the topic of the page, you should be conscious of the number of links.

Your website is your own property, and Google or any other search engine won’t disrespect that as long as you are focusing on relevance and value.

Should I NoFollow Internal Links?

You don’t have to nofollow the internal links, but in case a page has tens of other pages pointing to it already, and you are afraid of seeing any negative impact, you can definitely use the nofollow tag for search engines to not consider the link.

There’s this misconception that nofollow links mean you don’t ‘trust’ the links, and using the tag on internal links will indicate that you don’t trust your own website’s page, but that’s simply not true.

Nofollow links simply mean that you don’t want the crawler (or bot) to crawl the URL, or in other words, ignore it! Hence, there’s no problem with using nofollow tag on the links from the same domain.

But still, I would recommend you don’t create a situation where you will have to nofollow your in-house links. Makes sense, right?

How Many Internal Links Should A Blog Have?

There’s no limit on the number of internal links a blog can have as long as they are relevant but having 3-5 links per page or blog post is ideal. Many bloggers have claimed that they see great results when they use less than five inbound links.

Also, you don’t want to overwhelm your readers with links every now and then. It’s not going to look good at all, and overdoing it can hurt the user experience.

How Do I Find Internal Links To My Webiste?

The best way to find internal links to your website would be to head over to Google Search Console and visit the ‘Links’ section to analyze the data or numbers.

Website owners can also use various plugins to be able to find links, and last but not least – manually check out the pages to spot the links.

What Is The Other Name Of Internal Linking?

The other name for internal linking is inbound linking. Both the terms mean linking from one page to the other of the same domain.

How Is Internal Linking Different From External Linking?

Internal linking refers to an SEO practice where two relevant pages of the same domain are interlinked, whereas external linking refers to linking a page from one domain to the other. Internal linking is called inbound linking, and external linking is called outbound linking.

Here’s a table you can skim through to understand the difference in a better way;

Internal Links	External Links
A page linked to another page from the same website	A page linked to another page from a different website
These links may or may not boost traffic	These links are considered more effective if they are relevant
Helps search engines understand site architecture better	Helps search engines rank the pages higher for relevant topics

Which Is The Best Internal Linking WordPress Plugin?

LinkWhisper is the most powerful and effective inbound linking WordPress plugin that doesn’t only helps you add links faster but also provides suggestions that you can consider to interlink your pages.

Other than LinkWhisper, here are two other plugins bloggers can utilize;

1. Yoast SEO
2. Interlinks Manager

In Conclusion

These were the most common questions about inbound links that I had to answer at any cost. If you want to get some extra rewards from Google and Bing, I would advise you to add inbound links for better results.

I hope you found this small little article helpful. If you have got any questions or opinions to share, please feel free to jump into the comments section right below and let everybody know what your thoughts are.

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