Internal links: discovery, anchors, and a retired trick
Internal linking is one of the few SEO areas where the well-supported advice is also the simple advice. It also carries one famous technique that used to work and no longer does.
Last reviewed: 2026-09-15
Discovery
Supported: adding internal links helps crawlers discover pages, and pages with no incoming internal links are harder to discover through ordinary crawling. An orphan page can still be found through a sitemap or external links — but making your own navigation carry every page you care about is the reliable path.
Anchor text
Supported: Google associates the anchor text of a link with the destination page for retrieval and ranking. Descriptive anchors (“window installation prices”, not “read more”) tell both users and systems what the target page is about. Since September 2019, nofollow / sponsored / ugc attributes are hints about which links Google may consider, not commands.
The retired trick: PageRank sculpting
Historically, putting rel=nofollow on some internal links concentrated PageRank on the remaining followed links — “PageRank sculpting”. That is a historical fact about how it used to work, not current advice: our evidence policy files it as historical context only. If you meet this technique in an audit or a blog post today, treat it as a museum piece.
Editory’s recommendation
Link every page you want found from your navigation or from related pages, write anchors that describe the destination, and leave PageRank sculpting in the past. Editory-built sites get this by default: navigation menus, a generated sitemap, and internal link suggestions in the editor.
Common misconceptions
“Nofollow your unimportant internal links to push PageRank to the important ones.”
That worked historically and does not work now — our evidence base holds it under a historical-context-only policy. Google was already reported in 2005 as not using nofollow-link anchor text for target relevance.
What the engine does
renderer:sitemapEvery published site serves a generated sitemap.xml, so pages remain discoverable even before internal links point at them.
editor:link-field:internal-suggestLink fields in the editor suggest the site’s own pages first, making descriptive internal links the path of least resistance.
Evidence
The claims behind this page, with their status in the evidence release. Click a claim for its sources.
Supported — asserted as written
Practitioner guidance claims that adding internal links helps search-engine crawlers discover pages.Supported
Claim ID: clm_680bd464-36ce-4756-9c1c-1fe69a66ed87
Sources
- Link best practices for Google (Search Central) — Google (Search Central) · primary source
“Google uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl”
- SEO Link Best Practices for Google — Google Search Central · primary source
“internal links can help both people and Google make sense of your site more easily and find other pages on your site.”
- The ultimate guide to internal linking for SEO — Yoast
“adding internal links to your most recent posts ensures that search engine crawlers can crawl and index them”
- Internal Links Guide (Semrush blog) — Semrush
“Internal links help search engines find and index all site pages.”
Practitioner guidance claims that pages without incoming internal links are harder for search engines to discover through ordinary site crawling.Supported
Claim ID: clm_8b1af307-f2f0-4850-b483-65881a953d43
Sources
- How to Find and Fix Orphan Pages (The Right Way) — Ahrefs · primary source
“search engines may have difficulty discovering because they have no internal links”
- How To Find Orphan Pages — Screaming Frog · primary source
“this makes it more difficult for search engines to discover them”
- Orphan Pages: How They Affect SEO (And How to Fix Them) — Semrush
“search engine crawlers have no paths to follow to reach it”
- Orphan Page - Ahrefs SEO Glossary — Ahrefs
“The search engine may never discover a page with no internal links”
Practitioner guidance claims that an orphan page can still be discovered through a Sitemap or external backlinks even when internal links do not lead to it.Supported
Claim ID: clm_d0ef1f25-81e2-4322-8c29-88fe13efb3cb
Sources
- What is an Orphan Page? — Ahrefs · primary source
“To discover new pages, Google uses three sources: internal links, external links (backlinks), and sitemaps.”
- Orphan Pages: What are They? (and How to Find and Fix Them) — Backlinko · primary source
“Google can still index orphan pages if it finds them through your sitemap or external links.”
- Orphan Pages SEO Guide: How to Find & Fix — The SEO Works
“Google is still able to crawl and index orphan pages if they are linked from your XML sitemap”
- Orphan Pages: How They Affect SEO (And How to Fix Them) — Semrush
“the bot could still discover an orphan page through your sitemap even if you haven't linked to that page”
Anchor text on a linking page is associated with the destination page by Google for retrieval and ranking.Supported
Claim ID: clm_019ff143-c65d-7ef5-80e6-182646f79e0d
Sources
- Link best practices for Google — Google Search Central · primary source
“Google uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages”
- The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine — Stanford University (Brin & Page, WWW7 1998) · primary source
“we associate it with the page the link points to”
- Information retrieval — Google Research · primary source
“best description of a page is often derived from the anchor text associated with the links to a page.”
- Evolving "nofollow" – new ways to identify the nature of links — Google Search Central · primary source
“Links contain valuable information that can help us improve search, such as how the words within links describe content they point at.”
From September 2019, nofollow, sponsored, and ugc link attributes were described as hints about which links Google may consider or exclude for ranking.Supported
Claim ID: clm_c0c21706-d0c0-4b93-bcaf-38a642dc6dd7
Sources
- Evolving "nofollow" - new ways to identify the nature of links — Google Search Central Blog (Google for Developers) · primary source
“are treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search”
- Evolving "nofollow" – new ways to identify the nature of links — Google Search Central · primary source
“treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search”
- Everything Google Has Said On The Nofollow Link Attribute Change — Search Engine Roundtable
“The change went live yesterday (re hint for ranking with nofollow)”
- Nofollow, Sponsored, And UGC Links Explained — Botify
“Google has already begun to use nofollow, UGC, and sponsored link attributes as hints for ranking.”
Google was reported in 2005 as not using anchor text from rel=nofollow links to determine the target page’s relevance.Supported
Claim ID: clm_019ff15a-72e5-7dd7-b530-154b24a90d7c
Sources
- Google, Yahoo, MSN Unite On Support For Nofollow Attribute For Links — Search Engine Watch (Danny Sullivan) · primary source
“NOT count the anchor text in determining what terms the page being linked to is relevant for”
- PageRank sculpting — Matt Cutts · primary source
“In Google, nofollow links don’t pass PageRank and don’t pass anchortext.”
- Google adds new options to NOFOLLOW (thread quoting Jan 2005 Google blog and SEW) — WebmasterWorld
“those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results”
- What About Nofollow Links? — Web Page Mistakes
“Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links”
Historical context only
Using rel=nofollow selectively on internal links can concentrate more PageRank on other followed internal links.Historical
Claim ID: clm_4cbdf77b-97e0-5de0-9b1a-68b7041d82be
Sources
- PageRank sculpting — Matt Cutts (Google, head of webspam team) · primary source
“the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank”
- SEO Link Best Practices for Google — Google Search Central · primary source
“Use nofollow only when you don’t trust the source”
- Evolving "nofollow" – new ways to identify the nature of links — Google Search Central · primary source
“All the link attributes—sponsored, ugc, and nofollow—are treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search.”
- PageRank Sculpting Is Dead! Long Live PageRank Sculpting! — Search Engine Land (Danny Sullivan)
“Google looks at ALL the links (even the nofollow ones), divides PageRank equally”
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