Internal Linking
Internal linking is important for both user experience and search engine crawlers, to help them find relevant and important pages. Our SEO Office Hours recaps on internal linking topics cover queries including the importance of internal links for SEO, how anchor text is used as a ranking signal, and how Google handles internally linked parameter URLs for indexing.
For more on internal linking, check out: 5 Internal Linking Strategies to Boost SEO and Drive Organic Traffic
Internal links should use canonical URLs
Avoid internal linking to non-canonical URLs.
Links on paginated pages
In response to a question about whether it is ok to canonicalize back to page one of a paginated set, John expanded more on whether Google counts links within pagination:
Unlinked URLs Don’t Count as Links
Unlinked domains and URLs within body text don’t have any ranking benefits. if something isn’t linked, it won’t count towards PageRank.
Use Pagination to Join Split Pages
If you want to split up a page into 2 different URLs, you can’t redirect or canonicalise from the old URL to both new URLs. You can choose one of the new pages as the main one, and link to the secondary page. And you can paginate the pages together.
Hreflang Require Reciprocal Links
Hreflang works at a page level. If any pages don’t have recriprocal hreflang tags, they’ll be ignored, but it won’t affect any other pages with the correct configuration
Unwanted Sitelinks Pages Can Be Nonidexed
Sitelinks which do not disappear after being demoted, can be removed by adding a noindex. If the Sitelinks are showing incorrect international pages, hreflang tags can be used to identify the preferred version.
Creating Separate Landing Pages for Original Images
Create separate landing pages for any original images, which should be linked internally, so these can rank in Google web results.
301 Redirects Pass Full PageRank on a Site Level but Not per URL
If you redirect a full domain, e.g. www to non-www, or http to https, the full authority will be passed over, but individual 301 redirects do not pass the full authority.
Every Step in a Redirect Loses Some PageRank
With redirect chains, some additional authority is lost for each redirect in the chains, so you should minimise them, but the amount is small. Google recommends getting links updated to point directly to the new URL.