Internal Linking for Topical Authority: Hubs, Spokes and the Links That Dilute

Internal links do two jobs. They get a reader from the page they are on to the page they need next, and they tell search engines which pages on your site are the important ones and what they are about. Most sites do the first job badly and the second job by accident, through a navigation menu and an automated "related posts" block that links everything to everything.

Topical authority, the sense that a site is a reliable place for a whole subject rather than one page, is built partly on how the pages connect. Here is a model that works for a business site of any size.

What Google says about links, briefly

Google's link best practices are short and worth reading in full. The points that matter for internal linking:

• Links are a signal for relevance and the main way new pages get found. A page nobody links to is a page Google has to stumble on.
• Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site. That is Google's own phrasing.
• Anchor text should be descriptive, reasonably concise, and make sense out of context. "Click here" tells nobody anything; "list of cheese types" does.
• Do not chain links next to each other, because readers cannot tell them apart and each link loses the context of the words around it.
• There is no ideal number of links on a page. Google's advice is simply that if it feels like too many, it probably is.

And from Google's guidance on AI features: making content "easily findable through internal links on your website" is listed as one of the SEO fundamentals that still apply to appearing in AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Nothing exotic. The difficulty is applying it consistently across a few hundred pages.

The hub and spoke model

Think of each subject your business covers as a hub with spokes.

The hub is the page that owns the subject: the service page, or the main guide. It introduces the whole topic and links out to each spoke in context, in the order a reader would need them.

The spokes are the pages that go deep on one part: a sub-service, a how-to, a cost breakdown, a comparison, a frequently asked question that earned its own page. Each spoke links back to the hub and sideways to the one or two spokes that are its natural neighbours.

Cross-topic links happen at the hub level. Your boiler repair hub might link to your central heating hub where they genuinely overlap. Individual spokes do not link to unrelated subjects just because a plugin suggested it.

The result, drawn out, looks like a few wheels connected at their centres rather than a hairball. That shape is easy for a reader to navigate and easy for a crawler to understand: the hub collects the most internal links on its subject, which is a clear statement about which page matters most.

A worked example

Take a plumbing company with three services: boiler repair, boiler installation and central heating.

The boiler repair hub explains what goes wrong with boilers, how a repair visit works, what it costs, and when repair stops making sense. Within that text it links to:

• "common boiler fault codes and what they mean" (spoke) where it mentions error codes
• "boiler repair costs" (spoke) in the pricing paragraph
• "repair or replace: how to decide" (spoke) in the section about older boilers
• the boiler installation hub, once, in that same section

The fault codes spoke opens with the hub's one-line definition and a link back to it ("part of our boiler repair service"), lists the codes, and links sideways to the repair costs spoke where it mentions that some codes mean a bigger job. It does not link to the central heating hub, the blog post about energy bills, or the contact page three times.

The "repair or replace" spoke links back to the repair hub, forward to the installation hub, and to the installation costs spoke. That is the one place a reader naturally crosses from one subject to another, so that is where the link lives.

Three subjects, perhaps fifteen pages, every link placed where a reader would want it. You can draw the whole structure on a napkin, which is the test.

Anchor text: descriptive, varied, not stuffed

The anchor text is the words a reader clicks. Three rules:

Describe the destination, not the action. "See our boiler repair costs" rather than "click here for more". Google's tip is to read the anchor text on its own and check whether you could guess the page from it.

Vary it naturally. Linking to the same page from ten places with the identical exact-match phrase reads mechanically, and Google explicitly warns against cramming keywords into anchors. Use the phrase the sentence calls for: "what a repair visit costs", "typical boiler repair prices", "our pricing page". They all point at the same spoke and they all make sense in their sentence.

Keep the words around the link doing work. Google notes that "the words before and after links matter". A link that sits inside a sentence explaining why the reader might want it is worth more than a bare link on its own line.

The related-posts block, and when it dilutes

Almost every CMS offers an automated "related articles" widget, and most sites turn it on and forget it. The problem is what it does to the shape above. It adds three to six links to every page, chosen by tag or category or recency, with no regard for whether a reader at that point would want them. Over a hundred pages that is several hundred links that say nothing about which pages matter, and they often outnumber the deliberate links in the body.

When it helps: on a blog where posts are genuinely siblings (a series, a set of case studies), a small block of two or three hand-picked related posts at the end can be the natural next step.

When it dilutes: on service and guide pages, where the next step should be a specific spoke or the hub, not "you might also like". If you cannot explain why each suggested link is there, it is noise. Replace it with one or two deliberate links in the closing paragraph.

The same logic applies to giant footers that link to every service and every location. They are a navigation convenience, not a relevance signal, and they tend to flatten the distinction between your hubs and everything else.

Fixing an existing site without a rebuild

You do not need to restructure to improve this. A workable afternoon:

1. List your subjects and nominate a hub page for each. If a subject has no obvious hub, that is your first content gap.
2. For each hub, list the pages that should be its spokes. Pages that fit nowhere are candidates for merging or pruning.
3. Open each hub and add contextual links to its spokes where the text already mentions them. If the text does not mention a spoke, the hub is probably missing a paragraph.
4. Open each spoke and make sure it links back to its hub and to at most one or two sibling spokes.
5. Find orphans: pages with no inbound internal links apart from navigation. Search Console's Links report (internal links) and most crawlers will list them. Give each important one a home.
6. Look at your automated blocks and decide, page type by page type, whether they earn their place.

Then leave it. Internal link changes take weeks to work through, and constant tinkering makes it impossible to see what helped.

Questions people ask

How many internal links should a page have?

As many as the content naturally calls for and no more. A long hub might have a dozen; a focused spoke might have three. Google says there is no ideal number and that if it feels like too many, it is.

Should I link to the same page more than once on a page?

Once in the body where it is most relevant is usually enough. A second link in a closing summary is fine. Five links to the same page from one article is clutter.

Do nofollow tags matter for internal links?

Do not nofollow your own pages. Google's guidance reserves nofollow, sponsored and ugc for external links you do not vouch for, paid links, and user-submitted content. If you do not want a page in search at all, use noindex on that page instead.

Where Ranked fits

Mapping hubs and spokes, fixing orphans and tidying anchor text are standard parts of the on-page work in Ranked's SEO service, done in the first month and kept tidy as new content lands. If you have drawn your own napkin diagram and want someone to check it, send it over.