How to Fix: Internal links present

Internal links present is an SEO check in the On-Page SEO Essentials category, and it is a high-priority issue with a significant impact on your SEO performance. It is also, dollar for dollar, one of the highest-return moves in SEO — because internal linking is the one ranking lever you control completely, no outreach, no vendors, no waiting on anyone else.

What this check actually looks at

The check verifies that your pages link to other pages on your own site with meaningful, descriptive anchor text. When it fails, you usually have “orphan” pages — content with no internal links pointing to it — or posts that sit in isolation with no links out to related content. Either way, pages are stranded: hard for crawlers to reach, and disconnected from the topical structure that tells Google what your site is about.

Why it matters for SEO

Internal links do three jobs at once. They give crawlers the paths to discover and re-crawl your content — an orphan page can go unindexed for months. They pass authority: a link from a strong page lends ranking power to the page it points to, so you can deliberately funnel equity toward the pages that need to rank. And the anchor text is a direct relevance signal — linking to a page with the words “WooCommerce speed optimization” tells Google exactly what that page is for. Get internal linking right and you lift rankings across the whole site without earning a single new backlink.

How to check it yourself

• In Search Console, open the Links report and look at “Internally linked pages” — pages with zero or very few internal links are your orphans.
• Run a crawler (Screaming Frog, Ahrefs Site Audit) to get a full map of internal links and a clean orphan list.
• Open a few important posts and honestly ask: does this link out to my related content, and do my related posts link back to it?

How to fix it in WordPress

Difficulty Level: EASY – This fix is straightforward and can typically be completed by anyone with basic WordPress knowledge.

Estimated Time: varies

1. Fix orphans first: for every page with no inbound internal links, find two or three relevant existing posts and link to it from within their body copy.
2. Use descriptive anchor text that reflects the target page — not “click here” or “read more.” The anchor is a relevance signal; spend it well.
3. Build topical clusters: a pillar page on a broad topic linking down to detailed posts, and each detailed post linking back up to the pillar. This is the structure that reliably compounds.
4. Link from your strongest pages — the ones with the most authority and traffic — toward the pages you most want to rank.
5. Add internal links to old posts when you publish new ones; the archive is where most of the untapped linking opportunity lives.

What I would do first

Do it by hand, editorially, and be wary of plugins that auto-insert internal links by keyword. Automated linking tends to produce awkward, irrelevant links that read like spam and dilute the signal, and once you have thousands of them they are miserable to unwind. I would rather place fifty deliberate, genuinely helpful links than five hundred automated ones. Start with your money pages — the posts and products that actually need to rank — map three strong internal links into each, and make the anchor text earn its keep. This is quiet, unglamorous work, and it is exactly the kind that is still paying you back two years later.

Recommended Tools & Plugins

• Google Search Console – the internal Links report and orphan discovery
• Screaming Frog or Ahrefs Site Audit – full internal-link mapping
• Rank Math or Yoast SEO – internal-link suggestions while you write (use them as prompts, not autopilot)
• SEO Roadmap – complete SEO audit and action plan tool

This guide is part of the SEO Roadmap knowledge base – your complete resource for WordPress SEO optimization.