Internal linking: connect your pages to get found and sell

Why internal linking drives sales

“Maillage interne” (internal linking) is searched 590 times a month in France, “maillage interne SEO” 320 times. Behind this technical term lie three very concrete effects for a website that needs to pay.

Google discovers your pages by following links. A product page or a service page that no link connects to the rest of the site is an orphan page: Google finds it late, or never, even if it is in the sitemap.

Links say what matters. A page linked from the home page, the menu and several articles gets a clear signal of importance; a page buried six clicks deep gets the opposite signal.

Links guide the buyer. A visitor who lands on an advice article must find, in the right place, the link to the product or service that solves their problem. Without that link, they leave with the information and without buying.

What Google really follows: HTML links

Google is precise on this point: as a rule, Google can only crawl a link if it is an HTML <a> element with an href attribute. A button that opens a page through JavaScript, a drop-down menu built on hover or a filter that changes the address without a link are not links as far as Google is concerned.

Google adds a simple instruction: every important page should link to at least one other page of the site. It must also receive links, otherwise it stays orphaned.

The right format, to check in the source code of your pages (right-click, “View page source”):

• Good: <a href=“/guides/product-page”>write a product page that sells</a>
• Avoid: <span onclick=“location.href=’/guides/product-page’”>click here</span>
• Avoid: <a href=“#” data-url=“/product-123”>View</a> (the href leads nowhere)

On a shop, check the category pagination and the filters above all: if page 2 of a category only exists through a “Load more” button with no link, the products on page 2 do not exist for Google.

The three-click rule, and how to keep to it

On our own sites, the rule has been written down since 17 October 2026: every page sits three clicks or fewer from the home page through real HTML links, checked every week by an in-house crawler. That crawler moves through the site like Googlebot, following only real links, and lists the pages that are too deep or orphaned.

This check does not make a site recover on its own: on our sites, it did not prevent the drops linked to Google’s updates in summer 2026. It is the condition for Google to see your improvements. A rewritten page that cannot be found is useless.

1. 1
   Home page: links to the main categories or services, and to the pages that sell the most.
2. 2
   Categories or hubs: links to every product or every sub-service, with pagination made of real links.
3. 3
   Product and service pages: links to the parent category (breadcrumb), to two to four related products or services, and to the guide that answers the pre-purchase question.
4. 4
   Articles and guides: a link to the page that sells, at the moment the reader needs it, and two to three links to neighbouring articles.
5. 5
   Footer: the pages that are useful everywhere (contact, delivery, returns, legal notice), not a list of a hundred keywords.

Link text: say where it goes

The clickable text (the anchor) helps Google and the visitor understand the destination page. “Click here”, “learn more” or “view” say nothing. A useful anchor describes the page in a few natural words.

• Example for a shop: “our compact city pushchairs” rather than “view category”.
• Example for a tradesperson: “our boiler replacement prices” rather than “prices”.
• Vary the wording: the same page can be called “size guide”, “choosing your size” or “size chart” depending on the context.
• Do not use the same anchor for two different pages: you would be telling Google that both pages answer the same question.

Internal linking for an online shop

A shop has a natural structure: home page, categories, subcategories, product pages. Problems come from what gets added to that structure: filters, sorting, variants, out-of-stock products.

1. 1
   Filters and sorting: keep filter combinations out of followed links (or on the same canonical address), otherwise you create thousands of near-identical pages. Only create a real page for a combination that matches a real search, for example “waterproof women’s hiking shoes”.
2. 2
   Variants: one page per product, with sizes and colours as options, rather than one page per colour competing with each other.
3. 3
   Out-of-stock products: keep the page and its links if the product is coming back; if it is not, redirect to the closest replacement or remove the page cleanly.
4. 4
   Complementary products: a block of two to four genuinely related products (the case with the tablet) helps the buyer and connects your product pages to each other.
5. 5
   Buying guides: each guide links to the category and to the two or three products it recommends.

Internal linking for a service website

For a tradesperson, a practice or an agency, the page that converts is the service page, often by city or area. Internal linking must bring every visitor to it.

In our study of 2,747 websites of French small businesses, 26% of home pages have fewer than ten internal links: the home page, the strongest page of the site, passes almost nothing on to the service pages.

• One page per real service, linked from the home page and the menu.
• One page per area only if you really work there and have something of your own to say about it (lead times, projects, local constraints).
• Every advice article links to the service page and the quote form.
• Projects or case studies link to the service concerned.

Audit your internal linking in an hour

1. 1
   List the pages that must sell: the ten products, categories or services that matter most.
2. 2
   Open them from the home page: how many clicks does it take to get there? Beyond three, add a link from a higher page.
3. 3
   Check the code: are the links in the menu, the categories and the pagination <a href> elements?
4. 4
   Look for orphans: compare the pages in your sitemap with those a crawling tool finds starting from the home page; whatever is missing is orphaned.
5. 5
   Reread the anchors: replace every “click here” with a description of the page.
6. 6
   Link the articles to the pages that sell: one useful link per article, in the right place.