Internal linking strategies for large tech websites

Internal linking is the most underused SEO lever on most B2B tech sites we audit. Companies will spend six figures on link-building campaigns while leaving their highest-converting pages with three internal inlinks and a homepage burying the URL six clicks deep.

It’s not that internal linking is misunderstood in theory. Everyone knows links pass equity. The problem is that on a large tech site, with hundreds of blog posts, dozens of product pages, multiple integrations and a sprawling resources section, internal linking decays. New content gets published without inbound links. Old content stops being relevant but keeps being linked to. The map gets messy.

Here’s how we approach it.

Map before you plan

Every internal linking project we do starts with a crawl. We use Screaming Frog or Sitebulb, export the inlinks data and build a simple spreadsheet with three columns: URL, internal inlinks, organic clicks (last 90 days, from Search Console).

Then we sort the spreadsheet two ways:

1. Pages with high organic clicks and few inlinks. These are hidden winners. A handful of well-placed internal links usually lifts them further.
2. Pages with many inlinks and low organic traffic. These are wasting link equity. Either the targeting is wrong, the page is bad or the topic isn’t searched. Sometimes you redirect them. Sometimes you rewrite them. Sometimes you leave them and stop linking.

For a recent SaaS client with around 800 indexed pages, this single exercise identified 12 pages we could lift in the rankings just by reallocating internal links from older content. Two of those pages doubled their organic traffic in 60 days.

The hub-and-spoke model

For large tech sites, we plan internal linking around topic clusters. A pillar page anchors a topic. Supporting articles link up to the pillar and across to each other.

Pillar examples for an MSP site might be:

• Cyber security for SMBs
• Managed Microsoft 365
• Backup and disaster recovery
• IT support for [vertical]

Each pillar has 8 to 20 supporting articles around it. Every supporting article links back to the pillar. Pillar pages link out to all supporting articles. Supporting articles link sideways to two or three siblings where genuinely relevant.

This is the model Google’s documentation has implicitly recommended for years and the pattern that consistently works in our data. For more on building the topic structure itself, see our piece on topic clusters for technology companies, the related pillar-cluster approach for SaaS content in our content pillar and the page-level architecture in pillar page structure.

Anchor text discipline

The anchor text mistakes we see most often:

• “Click here”, “read more”, “learn more”. Wasted opportunity. The anchor is the strongest on-page signal for the destination URL and you’ve used it on a generic verb.
• Exact-match anchor stuffing. If 30 internal links to your “managed cyber security” page all use the exact phrase “managed cyber security”, that’s an anti-pattern. Vary it.
• Anchors that don’t match the destination. A link saying “our pricing page” that goes to a feature page confuses both Google and users.

Our rule of thumb: the anchor should describe what the user will find on the destination page, in the natural language of the surrounding sentence. If you can’t write that anchor without it feeling forced, the link probably shouldn’t be there.

Where internal links actually go

Most internal links on tech sites are in the global navigation, the footer and a handful of CTA boxes. That’s not internal linking, that’s templating. The links that move rankings are the contextual, body-copy links inside articles and on pages.

We audit body links specifically. On a properly linked tech site:

• Every blog post has 3 to 7 contextual outbound internal links.
• Every product page links to 2 or 3 supporting blog posts and at least one case study.
• Case studies link back to relevant service pages and product pages.
• Service pages link to deeper-funnel content (pricing, demo, contact) and to related services.

The footer and nav matter, but their effect is uniform across the site. The contextual links are what differentiate pages within a section.

Common patterns we fix

A few specific patterns we end up correcting on most large tech sites:

The orphan pattern

Pages with zero internal inlinks. Usually old campaign landing pages, sales-led microsites or content the editorial team forgot to link to. Crawl, identify and either link them in or noindex and remove from the sitemap.

The dead-end pattern

Pages that have inbound links but no outbound internal links of their own. The user reads the article, finds it useful and has nowhere to go next. We add 3 to 5 contextual outbound links and watch time on site improve.

The hub-with-no-spokes pattern

A pillar page that links nowhere because the surrounding content was never built. Either commission the cluster or repurpose the pillar as a regular service or category page. Don’t leave it as a 3,000-word essay with no support.

The siloed-blog pattern

Blog posts only link to other blog posts, never to commercial pages. Marketing teams worry about being too salesy. The fix is judgement: a blog about SEO migrations should naturally mention your SEO service, with a contextual link, near the end. That’s not aggressive selling, that’s helpful.

Tools and process

We use a combination of:

• Screaming Frog for the crawl and the inlinks export.
• Search Console for performance data joined to the crawl.
• Ahrefs or Semrush for external link context, which informs internal link priority.
• A simple spreadsheet for the audit and remediation plan. Internal linking is one area where bespoke tools tend to over-promise. A well-structured spreadsheet plus a clear workflow beats most automation.

For sites with thousands of pages, we’ll build a Python script that joins crawl data with GA4 and Search Console exports and outputs a prioritised remediation list. But that’s an optimisation, not a starting point.

A quarterly review cadence

The biggest mistake teams make is treating internal linking as a project. It isn’t. It’s a maintenance discipline.

We recommend a quarterly review:

• New content from the past 90 days. Does each post have 3+ relevant internal links pointing to it? If not, where should they come from?
• Any commercially important page (services, pricing, key product pages) that has lost inbound links because old posts were unpublished or restructured.
• New high-performing pages that should be linked into the pillar/cluster structure.

This is the single highest-impact hour of SEO work most marketing teams aren’t doing. We’ve covered the broader technical SEO audit checklist elsewhere; internal linking should be reviewed more often than the rest. The structural decision sitting underneath this, subfolders versus subdomains for tech sites, is worth getting right before you optimise links on top of it.

Internal linking and AI search

LLM-powered search adds another reason to take internal linking seriously. AI assistants tend to follow internal links to gather context when answering complex questions. A well-linked pillar page with strong supporting articles gives systems like ChatGPT and Copilot more material to cite. Our primer on AI search optimisation goes deeper on this.

If you’ve got a site with hundreds of pages and a sense that something isn’t quite right with how they connect, tell us about it. We’re usually able to spot a few quick wins in a 30-minute call. Our SEO service page has more on how we approach this work end to end.