Interlinking

Interlinking is the practice of linking your own pages to one another — a service page pointing to the case study that proves it, an article pointing to the product it describes, a contact page reachable from wherever someone might decide to get in touch. It is the ordinary connective tissue of a website, and unlike the links arriving from elsewhere, every one of them is yours to place.

Crawlers find pages by following links. A page nothing points at is an orphan: it may exist, it may sit in your sitemap, and it will still be reached late, rarely, or not at all. Beyond discovery, the pattern of your links describes your own hierarchy. The pages you point to most often, from the most places, are the pages you are telling every machine to treat as central — and nobody else can make that statement on your behalf.

AI systems tend to read a site in pieces rather than whole, and internal links are part of how those pieces stay connected. A passage that mentions your pricing without linking to it leaves the assistant holding half an answer. A link — with wording that actually names the destination — gives it somewhere to go and a reason to treat the two pages as belonging to the same subject.

It goes wrong in two directions. The common one is neglect: pages added over the years, each reachable only from the menu it was filed under, with no path between the ones that plainly belong together. The rarer one is excess — every other phrase turned into a link, or the same twenty links pasted at the foot of every page, which dilutes the signal and reads as machinery rather than help. Vague anchor text wastes the link in either case.

The human translation is this. Link from the place where the question arises — inside the sentence where a reader would naturally want more — rather than from a tidy list at the bottom that nobody reads. Then check the reverse: for each page that matters to you, ask which pages point at it. If the answer is only the navigation menu, you have not yet said that it matters.