Emeka Balogun

Linking is an editorial decision, and any tool treating it as an automated one will produce links nobody would have written. A page with no inbound internal link is reachable only by typing its address, and its existence is close to invisible. Where orphans appear, the cause is usually a navigation structure that has outgrown the site's content. Direction matters as much as existence. A page with many outbound links and no inbound ones is distributing authority it does not have, while a page with many inbound links and none out is a dead end for a reader. Healthy linking is bidirectional between related pages, which is an editorial relationship rather than a metric to optimise. Anchor text is where the wording decisions sit. Descriptive anchor text tells a reader and a crawler what they will get. Every page in this section gives the anchor text I would write and the reason, because 'click here' and a bare URL both work technically and fail at everything else. Anchor variety is a myth worth dismantling. Identical anchor text across unrelated destinations looks suspicious and is not a penalty; using one phrase for every link to the same page is simply poor writing. Finally, links need auditing for what happens at the other end. A link to a page that redirected years ago still works and still delivers nothing useful. The link audit is part of this work rather than a separate chore. A link that now lands on a redirect still counts as a link in most tools and delivers nothing, so an inventory full of them overstates how connected a site is.