When looking through a client’s Google Search Console, something interesting caught my attention.

A particular page “suddenly” started ranking and driving clicks.

We’re looking at a single article that has been live for over 2 years – never gaining any SEO traction beyond the odd impression or click.

Until suddenly it did.

What happened? Well, nothing happened.

• The article wasn’t updated – in fact, the entire website hardly changed for months now.
• The article didn’t acquire any backlinks.
• We didn’t add any internal links.
• The keywords didn’t suddenly start trending – it’s a pretty evergreen topic.
• No competitors suddenly lost rankings, causing our article to move up.

So I started digging…

There has to be a reason this article suddenly got picked up by Google, right?

Here’s what I found.

The article has no internal links

The first thing I noticed was the complete absence of internal links.

Not good.

The only ways Googlebot could discover the existence of this article are through the XML sitemap and through a single internal link from page 19 of the blog roll.

Here’s the path Google has to take in order to discover and crawl the article.

That’s a crawl depth of 20 – in other words, it takes Googlebot (or a user) 20 clicks from the main homepage in order to reach this article.

What does that communicate to both users and search engines?

That the article is not important.

Googlebot did discover the existence of the article when it was first published, and the crawler kept returning to the page every now and then.

It took nearly 2 years for Google to finally figure out that yes, the article is in fact valuable – and it now ranks #1 for all of the keywords it targets.

Since literally nothing changed, this pretty much concluded my research – it simply took Google way too long to realize this article contains value due to a lack of internal links.

Always add contextual internal links from other pages

To prevent this from happening, each new article you publish should have one or more internal links pointing to it from other pages.

Let’s see how this could look if you’d add just 3 or 4 internal links from other pages.

In this scenario, it takes only 2 clicks from the main homepage to discover the article.

There’s also a lot of additional click paths that point to the article.

This tells Google “this article is important – pay attention!”

If the internal linking was done like this from the start, Googlebot would have visited and crawled the page far more often.

It’s safe to say it would not have taken 2 years to understand the value!

How to prevent page discoverability issues with internal linking

So, what can you do to prevent this from happening?

Make internal linking part of your process

Ideally, you should bake internal linking into your content creation process.

When creating new content, always keep in mind what content already exists on your website that is topically related to what you’re currently writing.

Add internal links wherever possible.

You can also do the reverse and generate more content ideas you could create at a later stage, to which you can then add internal links from the article you’re currently writing.

If done correctly, your content – both old and new – should naturally pick up more and more internal links over time.

Related: How to Generate Endless Content Ideas and Never Run Out of Topics.

See what I did there? That’s what I mean 😉

Do a quick site search for each new article you publish

You can either search internally in your Content Management System (CMS), or you can do a Google search using the site: search operator.

Let’s use the article you are reading now as an example.

It’s about internal linking and page discoverability, so I’d like to add my internal links in that context.

This helps me discover existing articles where I talk about the same topic, which I can consider updating to include links to this article!

Regularly audit your internal links

Even if you do bake internal linking into your content creation – if you publish a lot of content, there’s always a chance one of your articles falls through the cracks.

That’s why you should regularly audit your internal links.

I like to use an awesome website crawling tool called Screaming Frog for this.

In particular, I’m interested in the unique inlinks and crawl depth metrics.

Here, you can see that the blog posts on my website have plenty of unique inlinks (internal links from unique pages).

They also all have a crawl depth of 1 or 2 – meaning they are 1 or 2 clicks away from the main home page.

Nice!

Tip: Create an SEO housekeeping process and include quarterly internal linking audits.

Include automatic internal linking to your website

You can add dynamic areas and widgets to your website that automatically get populated with internal links.

Examples:

• Article category and tag pages.
• A “related articles” section that links to topically related articles.
• Side bars linking to your most popular articles.

While these are great, I do strongly recommend adding contextually relevant internal links inside blocks of text throughout your website.

Nothing beats those, in my opinion!

Get an Internal Linking Audit Today

If your internal linking isn’t optimized, you may be leaving valuable rankings on the table.

It’s one of those things that easily gets neglected and can turn into a huge issue over time.

Contact me if you need help auditing your internal linking and identifying opportunities to improve. I can also help you implement changes.