At a structural level, internal linking structure improves SEO by establishing topical relationships between pages, controlling crawl priority, and distributing authority throughout the site. Search engines follow the links you place to understand how pages relate to each other. Without these deliberate connections, each new piece of content becomes a disconnected asset that search engines struggle to contextualise, rank, or revisit during subsequent crawls.
In many cases, new marketers haven’t spent time structuring their internal linking because they think that simply creating pages on their website is enough to get their site displayed automatically in search engines. I’ve watched businesses publish dozens of articles about their services, only to see just three of them show up in search results, though the rest are technically indexed. As this also happens on your website, it’s a major inefficiency where you’ve spent time and money creating pages while your traffic plateaus.
Contextual Links Create Meaning
You probably thought that optimising your site for the search engine audience involved adding internal links to your page. This is true, but these links must be placed thoughtfully and adjusted to how search engines work. Search engines don’t infer relationships from links; they follow the links, especially the contextual ones.
From an SEO standpoint, a contextual link in SEO is a hyperlink within a page’s body content that directs users to related information, with descriptive anchor text that signals topical relevance to search engines.
This kind of link must be distinguished from other internal links, which are called navigational links. Look at the difference between contextual link and navigational links below.
| Link Types | Contextual Links | Navigational Links |
| Purpose | Establishing topical relationship | Guiding users through site structure |
| Placement | Within body content with a descriptive anchor text | Headers, footers, sidebars |
| SEO Impacts | High signals relevance and transfers authority | High impact for user experience only, low signals relevance |
| Example Anchor Text | “our special traditional Javanese menu that will melt your mouth” | “Garang Asem” |
When embedded correctly in the body of a paragraph as anchor text, a contextual link is a deliberate connection in the text that makes the relationship clear.
In practical terms, when your garang asem origin story links to “our traditional Javanese menu,” that’s contextual. When it links by just a text “click here,” it’s a wasted signal. Contextual links are how meaning is transferred across a site, not just authority.
Because of this, marketers often doubt whether they can put contextual internal links. They’re afraid that the content will be stuffed with links.
Actually, there is no limit to the number of internal links you can place in a text, as long as your audience remains comfortable while reading your page. Google’s John Mueller has confirmed that pages can have hundreds of links without penalty. But if possible, keep it to no more than 50. InBlog’s analysis of internal links per page provides additional data on when link density starts to create diminishing returns.
Contextual links are just part of a page’s internal links, and a page also contains navigational links. Each additional link risks diluting the authority passed from that page, so prioritisation matters more than quantity. The practical ceiling is attention, not an algorithm.
To illustrate this clearly, the following examples show how internal linking structure either supports or undermines SEO performance.
Imagine this scenario: You handle a website of a Javanese restaurant, then your homepage links to your pillar page about garang asem. Then that pillar page links to five deeper pages, such as “variants of garang asem ingredients”, “cooking methods of garang asem“, “ideas to vary the taste of garang asem“, “cooking class for garang asem“, or “history of garang asem“.
Alternatively, your restaurant website’s homepage links to your pillar page about business meetings in your restaurant. Imagine the pillar page links to four thematic article pages, such as “tips for impactful lunch meeting”, “conducting a business meeting at a restaurant”, “booking rooms for a meeting in XXX Restaurant”, or “etiquette in attending a lunch meeting”.
Applying this structure helps you build a system where crawl flow and topical relevance reinforce each other. The homepage signals priority, the pillar page organises category authority, and the article pages create depth without distance. This is how you prevent new content from requiring manual resubmission every time you publish.
(Clicking the manual indexing request is exhausting when all we want is just a bowl of warm tongseng on our desk).
Auditing the Invisible Structure
During my own audits of my published content, I found that several of those had minimal internal links pointing to them. After I restructured my internal links, which also affected those suffering contents, they got more visibility. It costed a lot of time because before I discovered it, I only knew that the pages weren’t ranked without knowing the cause.
Beyond surface metrics, auditing internal link structure requires more than counting links. It requires identifying structural gaps.
This is how I usually audit an internal linking structure.
- Identify pages with no or minimal internal links pointing to them.
How can we find internal links to a page? I usually use Google Search Console (GSC), especially the Links menu.
- Measure crawl depth from the homepage to those minimal-incoming-link pages.
If a page requires more than three clicks to reach, it’s structurally orphaned.
“Pages with a depth of 1 to 3 generate 9 more SEO visits than those with a depth of 4 or more.” (My Ranking Metrics). - Check whether the incoming links originate from relevant pillar or contextual pages.
Links from any contextual pages are fine, but links from relevant pillars give the most strategic crawl position. While links originating just from sitewide navigation are deprioritised by search engines.
- Evaluate the clarity of the anchor text and its topical alignment.
Generic anchors like “read more” tell search engines nothing about destination relevance.
From a content perspective, this is where good writing fails silently. Not because it’s weak, but because it’s structurally unreachable.
For example, when I audited a hospitality client’s business website, I prioritised checking their highlighted service page. This client was a hotel in a touristy area that offered barbecue service, unlike any of its competitors. Unfortunately, Google didn’t really know that this hotel provided barbecue.
After closer inspection in the GSC, this page only got an internal link from another page, a page about a restaurant. To reach this barbecue page from the homepage, I should click a link to an outlet page, then click another link to the outlet’s restaurant. So, this barbecue page had a crawl depth of 4, which kept it orphaned.
A business website that fails to convert from its service page is usually because those pages are structurally isolated. The business teams don’t realise it because they rely solely on publishing 30 new articles each month without auditing their internal linking structure.
Vicky Laurentina, 2026
Building Without Structural Debt
Most of the time, internal linking gets built retroactively, after someone notices the traffic problem. By then, you’re fixing debt instead of preventing it.
Step 1: Define pillar pages based on core business categories. For restaurants, this pillar page typically belongs to a page which drives their business objects.
You probably mine your restaurant income from your speciality menu, locations, or particular services (catering, delivery). So, let these pages be your pillars.
Some restaurants also run e-commerce on their websites, offering products customers can buy online. You can provide several pages on your website for e-commerce. For an e-commerce site structure, the pillar pages might represent product categories (speciality ingredients, speciality snacks, or any hampers that become your speciality).
Step 2: Link all related content from its pillar page contextually, using descriptive anchor text that reflects the page’s intent. Avoid repetitive exact-match keywords.
Step 3: Control crawl depth so no critical page is more than three clicks from the homepage.
Step 4: Maintain each page to only have a maximum of 150 links. If possible, maintain no more than 50.
When a pillar page becomes too dense with links, create an intermediate hub page. This organises subcategories and maintains crawl accessibility.
In e-commerce site structure, this might mean a “traditional Indonesian spices” hub that sits between your main “speciality ingredients” pillar and individual product pages for galangal, candlenut, and tamarind. The hub prevents the pillar from becoming unwieldy while preserving the three-click rule.
By design, this framework prevents future visibility loss by encoding discoverability into the publishing workflow. Pages that aren’t contextually linked from pillar content are only accessible via on-page navigation, which search engines crawl inconsistently.
For content and editorial teams, this affects how you name sections, links, and supporting articles. From an anchor text perspective, variation signals topical clarity before search engines even crawl each page. For example, to refer to pages about garang asem, I don’t use the anchor text “traditional Indonesian recipes” all the time, but I use anchor texts like “how we prepare garang asem ayam” and “garang asem sapi pedas.”
Collaboration with a content strategist (like me) removes the decision fatigue here, because you will implement a framework that’s already been stress-tested across client sites, where growth exposed every structural weakness.
If you’re running (or planning to maintain) a restaurant website with more than fifty menus, your internal linking structure is either compounding your content investment or quietly eroding it. Before you publish too many articles, pressure-test whether your current structure can actually distribute authority and crawl access at scale.
Discuss with me how I approach businesses that need a content strategy to survive and grow. If you’re responsible for execution but not yet confident in validating architecture decisions on your own, external review helps prevent costly rework. Identify where discoverability breaks before it becomes a revenue issue.
I am a content strategist who loves blogging about planning and optimising content for marketing insights. Follow me on LinkedIn and Instagram below.