TL;DR: There’s no ideal number of internal links for a page, and Google says so directly. For a typical blog post, look for useful opportunities to link to related pages in the body copy, but let the reader’s needs determine the number. Make sure every page you care about is linked from at least one other relevant page, use link text that describes the page it points to, and stop adding links once they stop helping the reader. The old “100 links per page” rule is a leftover from how Google used to work, not a current limit.
Internal links are the links from one page on your site to another: your menu, your footer, and the links you add inside your content. They help visitors find their way around, and Google uses them to find your pages and work out what they are about. So it’s a fair question how many you should be adding.
How Many Internal Links Should a Page Have?
There isn’t a correct number. Google’s own link best practices guide says there is “no magical ideal number of links” a page should contain, though if you think it is too much, it probably is.
For a typical blog post or service page, look for contextual links that help readers take a useful next step. There is no reliable links-per-word target. A 1,000-word post with no internal links at all is probably missing chances to help the reader. The same post with a link in every sentence is probably distracting them.
Use relevance as the test. A short service page might only need one or two links in its copy. A long guide that covers several related topics might sensibly have more. The right number is however many links a reader would find useful at that point in the page.
Where Does the “100 Links Per Page” Rule Come From?
You’ll still see advice to keep every page under 100 links. That figure goes back to an old Google recommendation. Matt Cutts, then head of Google’s webspam team, explained in 2009 that it started because Google used to index only about the first 100 kilobytes of a page, so links further down could be missed. By then Google was indexing more than that, and he said the remaining reason to keep links down was user experience. He was also clear that a page with more than 100 links is not automatically treated as spam.
Google’s current guidance doesn’t give a limit at all, just the “no magical ideal number” line above. Neither source treats 100 as a line that triggers a penalty, though a page with hundreds of links is still hard going for readers.
It’s also worth knowing that link counts from SEO tools usually include your menu and footer. A site with a large dropdown menu can have well over 100 links on every page before anyone has written a word of content. That is common, and it is not something to fix just to bring the count down. The links worth thinking about are the ones you choose to add in your content.
Can You Have Too Many Internal Links?
Yes, and the easiest way to spot it is to read the page as a visitor would. Signs a page has gone too far:
- Links in almost every sentence, so none of them stand out
- Several links to the same page from the same few paragraphs
- Links to pages that aren’t related to what the reader is looking at
- Link text stuffed with keywords rather than describing the page. Google’s guidance specifically warns against cramming keywords into link text, and keyword stuffing is against its spam policies
A simple test: would someone reading that paragraph plausibly want to click that link at that point? If not, it’s probably there for the wrong reason.
“One of the most common internal linking mistakes we see in client audits is relying on the main navigation to do all the work. Blog posts can attract relevant organic traffic, but if they never link to related service pages, they miss the chance to guide readers towards conversion.
Our rule of thumb is to prioritise relevance over link count. Every internal link should help users find useful information, help search engines understand how pages relate, or guide visitors to a logical next step. If a link does none of these, it probably isn’t needed.” – Eviee Taylor, Senior SEO Executive
What Matters More Than the Number
If you’re going to spend time on internal links, these three things will make more difference than getting the count right.
Make sure every important page is linked from somewhere. Google’s advice is that any page you care about should be linked to from at least one other page on your site. A page with no internal links pointing to it, often called an orphaned page, is harder for Google to find and harder for visitors to reach. A sitemap can help Google discover it, but Google’s sitemap guidance describes a properly linked site as one where every important page can be reached through your menu or links on other pages.
Point links towards the pages that matter to your business. Google uses links between pages as one of the ways it works out what pages are about and which might be most helpful for a search. If your blog posts talk about a service you offer but never link to that service page, you’re missing an easy way to show how your content fits together. A common approach is to add links to your key pages from the related content that already gets the most visits. For a wider look at how pages should fit together, see our post on whether site structure is important for SEO.
Use link text that describes the page. Google recommends link text that is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to both pages, and advises against generic phrases like “click here” or “read more”. Something like “our guide to the difference between internal links, backlinks and external links” tells both the reader and Google what to expect.
I was managing SEO for a website with very weak internal linking. Service pages were grouped by brand, and each brand section linked to individual products in the range. However, these links were jump links to sections on a single brand landing page, rather than to distinct pages. As a result, no product had its own indexable URL, so none could rank in Google. We created commercially focused content for each product, which won organic rankings for those pages and improved the business’s internal linking. – Andy Blanchard, SEO Account Manager
Top Tip: Before adding links to any single page, open Google Search Console and go to Links, then Internal links, then Top linked pages. Ignore the pages every template links to, like your homepage, contact page and privacy policy, and look at where your key service or product pages sit compared with your blog posts. If an old blog post has more internal links than the page you want enquiries from, that’s the gap to fix first. Click into a priority page to see which pages already link to it, and add links from related content that doesn’t. The report shows a sample rather than every link, so use it to compare pages, not as an exact count.
How Wildcat Handles This
Internal linking is part of our technical SEO service, alongside crawlability and site structure. We also run a technical SEO audit early in a campaign to set priorities for the first few months.
It helps if you can tell us which pages matter most to your business, so we know which pages your internal links most need to support.
If you’d like help with how your site is linked together, take a look at our technical SEO service or get in touch with our team to talk it through.
Andy Blanchard
Senior SEO Executive
