This lesson treats internal links as an entity signal: which pages share an entity, which page owns it, and what the anchor text says. It finds opportunities from the audit data, turns them into a plan and shows how we automated the same thing on our own sites.
What this lesson covers
- The inlinks report, read as an entity signal
- Opportunities from shared entities
- Three link patterns
- Anchors that reinforce canonical names
- Shipping a plan in rounds
- Link rules and a link-graph audit
On the demo site, more than half of the 43,729 internal link rows are navigation, using just 42 anchor texts, and 25 pages have no internal link at all. The lesson finds pairs of pages that share a prominent entity and are not yet linked, then shows the trap in the first unfiltered run — a generic entity producing dozens of meaningless pairs — and the filters that fix it. It sets out three link patterns, explains the hub as a page that owns an entity, and argues that anchors using the canonical name are the cheapest consistency fix there is.
The second half is about shipping: twenty links at a time, orphans first, each placed in a sentence that already discusses the entity. It then shows what we built. The Auto Links plugin on datastudioformarketers.com applies one table of entity-to-page rules at render time, skips headings, existing links and code, and can be switched off without leaving anything behind. A link-graph audit of the mlforseo.com blog found posts with at most one contextual internal link, true orphans and pages more than three clicks from home. The glossary works as a hub layer, with relationships stored as data.
Throughout, the lesson insists that a link plan is not finished until the links are live and measured, which is why it ends with the number of links per round, the order in which to ship them and a re-crawl rather than a spreadsheet handed to a client.
This lesson continues Module 5, Remediation: Fixing Entity Representation, in The AI-powered Entity Audit, and is followed by a practical that builds the link plan and rules from your own files. It suits SEOs who want internal linking that follows meaning rather than menus.