Google mainly finds pages by following links. This guide summarizes Google's documented rules for crawlable links, anchor text, linking to your important pages, and the nofollow, sponsored and ugc attributes.
Google's SEO Starter Guide says Google primarily finds pages through links from other pages it has already crawled. It also says the vast majority of new pages Google finds every day are found through links. A sitemap is an optional extra, not a replacement.
The guide adds that PageRank, the link-based system, is only one of many ranking signals. So links help discovery and understanding, but they are not the whole story.
The guide also says links connect users and search engines to other parts of your site. Descriptive URLs and grouping pages in directories help users and Google understand how pages relate to each other.
Google's link documentation says Google can generally only crawl a link if it is an <a> element with an href attribute. Absolute URLs, root-relative paths such as /products, and relative paths such as ./products all work. Extra attributes such as onclick or class are fine. Links inserted by JavaScript are crawlable if they use the same <a href> markup.
Google lists markup it does not recommend and may not parse reliably: javascript: values in the href, <span> elements with an href, routerLink, and elements that only have an onclick handler. A link needs to resolve to a real URL.
Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link. Google says it tells users and Google something about the page you are linking to. Put it between the crawlable <a> tags. Google calls empty links a bad practice. If a link is empty, Google can fall back to the title attribute. For image links, Google uses the image alt text.
Google advises anchor text that is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to both the current page and the target page. It says to avoid generic phrases such as click here or read more. A simple test: read the anchor text on its own. If it makes no sense out of context, make it more specific. Do not force keywords in, because keyword stuffing violates Google's spam policies.
Google says every page you care about should be linked from at least one other page on your site. A page with no internal links pointing to it is often called an orphan page. Google's documents do not use that term in the pages reviewed here, but the rule above is the same idea.
Google also recommends linking to related resources in context, giving links surrounding text, and avoiding clusters of several links together. It says there is no ideal number of links per page, but too many is a sign to trim.
Google defines three rel values for links. Use sponsored for advertisements and paid placements. Use ugc for user-generated content such as comments and forum posts. Use nofollow when the other values do not apply and you would rather Google not associate your site with the linked page. The page notes nofollow is still an acceptable way to flag paid links, though sponsored is preferred.
You can combine values, for example rel="ugc nofollow". Google says links marked this way will generally not be followed. The word generally matters: pages can still be found through sitemaps or links from other sites. These attributes apply only to <a> elements Google can crawl. To block fetching, use robots.txt. To block indexing, use a noindex rule.
Google also says to use nofollow for sources you do not trust, not for every external link. For internal links, it points to the robots.txt disallow rule rather than nofollow.
The same split exists at page level. Google's robots meta tag documentation defines the nofollow rule as an instruction not to follow the links on that page. It notes that without the rule, Google may still use the page's links to discover other pages. The documentation page was last updated 2026-03-24.
Audit your templates for links that are not real <a href> elements. Check rendered HTML in the URL Inspection tool if links are added by JavaScript. Make sure each important page has at least one in-content link from a related page. Replace generic anchor text with descriptive text.
Sources were last checked on October 13, 2026. Documentation changes, so confirm any detail that matters to a decision against the source itself.
Indexive Research. (2026, August 26). Internal links best practices from Google's own documentation. Indexive AI. https://indexive.ai/research/internal-links-best-practices
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Google says it generally needs an <a> element with an href. Elements that rely only on onclick are not recommended and may not be parsed reliably.
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