---
name: internal-links-at-publish
description: Use when you are about to publish a page and want its links to be right on day one rather than fixed in a later audit.
---

# Place Internal Links at Publish Time

Internal linking is normally treated as a periodic audit, which means every new page spends months as an orphan and every audit rediscovers the same problems. Doing it at publish time costs about ten minutes per page and removes the audit almost entirely. The part people get wrong is direction: adding links out of the new page is easy and does very little, while adding links into it from existing pages is what actually matters.

## What you need first

- a list of your existing pages with their organic traffic or authority ranking
- the new page's primary query
- your current anchor text usage for that query

## Method

1. Find three to five existing pages that already discuss the new page's topic in passing. Search your own site for the topic phrase rather than guessing from a sitemap.
2. Add the inbound links first, editing those existing pages. A new page with five contextual inbound links from established pages behaves very differently from one linked only from a category listing.
3. Place each link inside a sentence that would exist anyway. Links appended as "read more about X" at the end of a section pass less signal and get clicked less.
4. Vary the anchor text naturally across the inbound links but keep the topic constant. Identical exact-match anchors from five pages look engineered and add nothing beyond the first.
5. Check the click depth of the new page from the homepage. Anything more than three clicks deep needs a link from a hub or navigation page, not just body links.
6. Add outbound links from the new page last, and only where they genuinely help the reader continue. This direction helps the linked pages, not the new one.

## What this produces

A published page with several contextual inbound links from relevant existing pages and a click depth of three or less.

## Where this goes wrong

- Relying on automated related-post modules, which are usually site-wide boilerplate and carry far less weight than a link inside a paragraph
- Linking from the new page outwards and calling the job done, which does nothing for the page you just published
- Building links to a page from irrelevant pages just to raise the count, which muddies the topical signal you were trying to send

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From the QuQi skill library - https://www.quqi.io/skills/internal-links-at-publish