Yoast internal links: why one link passes and what that misses

The rule and its companion check

The internal links check sorts links in your post content that point to your own domain:

• Red: "No internal links appear in this page, make sure to add some!"
• Orange: "The internal links in this page are all nofollowed. Add some good internal links."
• Green: any followed internal link.

Orange exists because nofollowing links to your own pages is almost never useful. It tells search engines not to follow a path through your own site.

Yoast pairs this with a less familiar check called Competing links. It goes red when a link in your post uses your focus keyphrase, or a synonym, as its exact anchor text: "You have a link which uses your keyphrase or synonym as its anchor text." The logic is that anchor text describes the target page, so linking the words cold brew ratio to a different post suggests that other post is the one about cold brew ratios. Only a full match counts; anchor text with extra content words, such as cold brew ratio calculator, is not treated as competing.

Why internal links are worth the attention

Search engines discover most pages by following links, and they use the anchor text and surrounding words to understand what the linked page covers. Google's own documentation on links recommends descriptive anchor text for exactly this reason. A page that nothing links to, an orphan page, can still be found through a sitemap, but it gets no context and little internal importance.

Links also shape how visitors move. A reader who finishes a post on grinding coffee and sees a link to a post on grind size for espresso is likely to keep reading. That is the same behavior that makes a site easier to crawl.

What a single link cannot tell you

Because one link passes, the check says nothing about the things that make internal linking work:

• Direction. It looks at links going out of this post. It cannot see whether any other post links to this one, which is what keeps new content from being orphaned.
• Relevance. A link to your homepage or privacy policy counts the same as a link to the most relevant guide.
• Anchor quality. "Click here" passes as easily as a descriptive phrase.
• Broken targets. A link to a URL that now returns 404 still counts as an internal link.

Yoast SEO Premium adds internal linking suggestions in the editor, which help with relevance, but the free check itself is a presence test.

Linking with a purpose

A short routine for each new post:

1. Link out from the new post to two or three closely related pages, using anchor text that describes each target.
2. Then do the step the check never asks for: open two or three older posts on related topics and add links to the new one.
3. Point your most important pages, the ones you want to rank, from several relevant posts, not just from your menu.
4. Skip your own focus keyphrase as anchor text for links to other pages, so the competing links check stays green and your signals stay clear.

It is safe to leave the check red on pages with no natural next step, such as a thank-you page or a legal notice. For a fuller approach, see our internal linking strategy.

Internal links in Hydrogen SEO

Hydrogen SEO sets a higher bar in its per-post SEO score: full points for links need three or more internal links plus at least one external link, and a single link of either kind earns half.

The gaps above are covered by the site-wide audit, which finds orphan pages that no other page links to and broken internal links pointing at 404s, so you can fix the direction and the dead ends a per-post check cannot see.