Internal linking is the only kind of link building you fully control, and it almost always belongs before any external work. So instead of advice, here is this site's own link graph.
We have 46 published posts. The median carries four internal links, the lowest zero, the highest eight. One post has no internal links at all. Fifty two distinct destinations receive links and fourteen of them are linked exactly once.
The real graph, undressed
| Destination | Posts linking to it |
|---|---|
| Home page (web design) | 12 |
| SEO services | 12 |
| What Core Web Vitals are | 11 |
| How hosting affects speed | 11 |
| Hosting | 10 |
| What SEO is | 8 |
| Site speed service | 8 |
That shape is correct: the pages that sell and the pages that explain the fundamentals take the most links. What is not correct is those fourteen single link destinations. A page with one internal link is telling Google that nobody on this site thought it worth referencing.
A mistake we made ourselves
This site's anchor archive holds 2,053 anchors across 221 destination URLs. Twenty five of them are a repeated text pointing at the same destination. Keyword research three times to one page. WordPress hosting plans three times to another.
Not a catastrophe, but it costs twice. The exact repetition of an anchor across several pages reads as a pattern rather than a choice. And more importantly, two identical anchors send one signal, not two; the second phrase was wasted.
After seeing that number we put an automatic check in front of saving, comparing every new anchor against the whole archive. The twenty five old ones stay where they are, because a bulk rewrite of published pages is a bigger risk than the problem.
The order that actually works
Internal links exist for one purpose: passing topical relevance to a page that sells. Not for raising a link count.
- Decide which pages sell. Usually three or four. If ten pages are important, none of them is. On this site they are building sites, web hosting plans and SEO, and the graph above reflects exactly that.
- Write the pieces that answer those readers' questions. One distinct question per piece. Two pieces answering the same question damage each other, and we have written that up with examples.
- One strong link upward from each piece. One link, in the prose, with a phrase describing what the destination covers. Not in the footer, not in a related posts box.
- And two or three sideways. To sibling pieces, so the crawler has a path and the reader does not dead end.
Anchor text: the rule most often stated backwards
The common advice is to make the anchor the exact keyword. For internal links that advice is bad, because every link you own ends up the same shape and you lose the value of variety.
An anchor should describe what sits behind it. Keyword research is fine once; by the third time it is repetition. A phrase like the tool that shows Persian search volume introduces the same destination and adds a new phrase to the site.
Three things internal links do not fix
A thin page does not rank because you linked to it; it just gets indexed faster and stays where it was. Two pages targeting one phrase are not repaired by linking them together; one of them has to be re-scoped. And a slow site gets no measurable benefit from internal linking at all.
What these numbers do not cover
The graph above counts links inside post bodies only. The menu, the footer and the theme's related posts block add others, which we excluded because they are identical on every page and carry no topical meaning. These figures are also for the Persian versions; the translated versions carry their own links under a language prefix.
Questions people actually ask
How many internal links per article?
There is no magic number. On this site the median is four and the maximum eight. If you are placing a link you would not click yourself, that link is filler.
Link from strong pages to weak ones, or the reverse?
Both, for different reasons. From a ranking page to a new one, to pass authority. From a new page to one that sells, to pass the reader. Those are not the same job.
Do footer links count?
Barely. A link repeated on every page of a site builds no particular topical relationship. The link inside a paragraph, where the subject is genuinely being discussed, is the one that does work.
Should internal links be nofollow?
No. Sculpting internal authority with nofollow stopped working years ago and Google has said so. If you do not want a page to receive authority, do not link to it.
If you want to know what your own internal graph looks like and which of your pages are linked exactly once, send the address and we will run this same count. The SEO services page explains the rest of the work.
This site's internal link graph was counted on 3 September 2026 across 46 published posts. Body links only, no menu or footer.
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