AI + Search Exposure Inspection

Internal Link

A link from one page of a site to another, present in the HTML response rather than added by script.

Also known as Same-site link. Updated .

What it means

Internal links are how a crawler finds the rest of a site and how it works out what a page relates to. They also carry meaning: a link from a page about inspections to a page about structured data says those subjects are connected.

The part a short definition leaves out

Zero internal links in the raw HTML usually means the navigation is being built client-side. That is not a content problem and no amount of adding links in the editor fixes it, because the editor output is not what the crawler receives.

Related terms

  • Anchor Text The visible words inside a link, which describe the destination to anything that cannot see the page.
  • Client-Side Rendering Building page content in the browser with JavaScript after the server has already sent its response.
  • XML Sitemap A machine-readable list of the URLs on a site that its owner wants crawled.

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The inspection reports on this signal directly, alongside thirty-seven others, and tells you whether it is a quick fix on your site or something deeper.

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