Understanding it
A bot discovers a page by following links. A page no link points to, or one sitting 6 clicks from the homepage, is crawled less often and carries less weight. The link structure tells Google what the site considers important.
The link text, called anchor text, matters as much as the link itself. Google recommends short, descriptive text: “website redesign pricing” is informative, “click here” says nothing about the destination.
Structured approaches such as silos or topic clusters organize linking by theme: a pillar page on the broad subject, supporting pages on specific questions, linked to one another. Practitioners report that AI bots also follow these links to connect the topics of a site.
A concrete example
Illustrative example: articles that serve the offer
A recruitment consultancy has been publishing articles on interviews, employer branding and job descriptions for 2 years. They bring in traffic, but none of them links to the page for its executive search service, which stays on page 2.
The firm adds a contextual link to that page in each article, with descriptive anchor text, and links related articles to one another. The service page now receives the authority built up by the content, and readers have a path to the service.
The common mistake
Mass linking with the same anchor
A block of 50 footer links, or the same exact anchor repeated everywhere, helps neither readers nor Google. Add few links, where they help the reader, with varied anchors that genuinely describe the target page.