Internal linking: architecture, anchor text, and crawl depth
Internal linking is how the pages of a site connect to each other. It is one of the most controllable and underused levers in SEO, shaping how visitors move, how crawlers discover pages, and how authority flows across the site.
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What internal links do
Internal links serve three jobs at once. They help readers navigate to related content, they let crawlers discover and re-visit pages, and they pass a share of a page’s authority to the pages it links to. A page with no internal links pointing at it is nearly invisible.
Because you control every internal link, you can deliberately route authority toward the pages that matter most — your key service or pillar pages — instead of leaving it spread thinly and by accident across the whole site.
Anchor text and relevance
The clickable text of a link, its anchor, tells both readers and engines what the destination is about. Descriptive anchors — the actual topic rather than click here — pass a clearer relevance signal and make the destination more likely to rank for that theme.
The goal is natural, varied anchors that describe the target honestly. Over-optimising by forcing the exact keyword into every anchor reads as manipulation and helps no one; a human-first phrasing usually is the correct one.
Crawl depth and structure
Crawl depth is how many clicks a page sits from the home page. Pages buried deep get crawled less often and are treated as less important. A flatter structure, where key pages are two or three clicks away, keeps them discoverable and fresh.
A common pattern is the hub-and-spoke: a central pillar page links out to detailed cluster pages, and each cluster page links back. This tells engines the pages belong together and concentrates authority on the hub, lifting the whole group.
Where Kirti fits
Kirti is being built to map a brand's internal link graph during its audit — spotting orphaned pages, over-deep content, and thin anchor signals — and to suggest links that connect related work, which the team reviews before they are added.
The agent is still in active development and not yet generally available, so this guide explains the practice itself, which applies to any site regardless of how it is built.