Why internal links matter more than most people think
Search engines discover and weigh pages largely through links, and the links you control are the internal ones. A page nothing links to is invisible to crawlers except through the sitemap, gets none of the authority your homepage and popular posts have earned, and tells the engine it is unimportant. Meanwhile your best-earning pages hoard authority they could be passing on. Internal linking is the cheapest lever in SEO and the one most sites never pull because doing it by hand across hundreds of posts is tedious.
Step 1: find the orphans
Install Dragon Internal Links, open Tools, then Internal Links, then Dashboard, and run the first scan. It indexes every internal link on the site. The Orphan Posts view lists content with no inbound links at all, prioritised by importance.
Orphans come from predictable places: posts published in a hurry, pages created for a campaign, old content migrated from another site. Each is a quick win: one or two relevant links from established pages and it stops being invisible.
Step 2: rank the opportunities by relevance, not keyword overlap
The Suggestions view lists, for each post, opportunities to link to related content, with the anchor text found in your actual copy. What makes a suggestion worth taking is relevance, and "the target's title appears in the text" is a poor proxy for it: a post that mentions "email" once is not a good link to your email deliverability guide.
Suggestions here are scored by TF-IDF document similarity across your content, so the page that is genuinely about the same thing outranks the one that merely shares a word. Optionally, add your own AI API key (OpenAI, Anthropic or Google) under Settings and the front-runners are re-ranked for editorial relevance with one small request per post. The key is stored encrypted and no account with us is needed; without a key, the similarity scoring applies on its own.
Step 3: apply links without mangling the copy
For each suggestion you accept, Apply inserts the link at the first occurrence of the anchor text and touches nothing else. Read the sentence once before applying: the anchor should read naturally as a description of where the link goes. Skip suggestions where the matched phrase is a heading, a quote, or inside a call to action.
Rules of thumb that hold up:
- Link from strong pages to weak ones that deserve it, not only the other way round.
- Two to five internal links per post is plenty. Twenty is noise.
- Descriptive anchors. "how to migrate WordPress to a new domain" beats "click here" every time.
- Link to the page that should rank for that phrase, consistently. Two pages competing for the same anchor split the signal.
- Prefer newer to older: when you publish something new, add links to it from three older posts on the same topic in the same session.
Step 4: keep the graph healthy
Turn on auto-scan on save and a scan frequency in Settings so the index stays current, and exclude categories you never want linked (news archives, legal pages). Then two habits:
- Check orphans monthly. New content orphans itself constantly.
- Check for broken internal links with Dragon Broken Links. A link to a post that was trashed or renamed is worse than no link. The workflow is in find and fix broken links.
Internal linking pays off fastest on the posts that are already losing ground: a refreshed post with new inbound links from your recent content recovers faster than one refreshed alone. See finding decaying content in GA4.
Checklist
- First scan run, orphan list reviewed
- Every orphan that deserves traffic has at least two inbound links
- Top suggestions applied on your ten most important posts
- Auto-scan on save enabled
- Broken internal links scanned and fixed