Internal linking plan

Purpose

Map useful internal links across a content corpus so readers can move between related needs and search engines can understand topic relationships.

Scope

The skill covers link inventory, topic relationships, anchor suggestions, orphan and excessive-link findings, and prioritized recommendations.

Excluded: editing pages, crawling unavailable URLs, and external link building.

Data basis

• Content corpus and URL inventory in scope.
• Keyword clusters, audience journeys and linking rules supplied or in scope.

Result

A link-opportunity sheet and a short architecture brief.

Quality criteria

• Every recommendation cites source and target content.
• Anchor text describes the target without repetition or manipulation.
• Links serve a reader journey or clear topic relationship.
• Missing or ambiguous targets are flagged.

Instructions

Prefer links that answer the next reader question. Do not infer authority from unsupported metrics. Keep anchors natural and specific, and distinguish proposed links from links already present. Avoid recommending links between pages with no meaningful relationship.

Adapt before use

• Map URL, title, topic and existing-link fields.
• Add keyword clusters, audience journeys and linking rules.
• Define orphan, duplication and priority criteria.
• Keep source facts, analysis, recommendations, and unresolved questions visibly separate.
• Preserve stable document, section, page, sentence, URL, or row identifiers in every finding.
• Record assumptions about audience, channel, period, approval status, and data coverage.
• Treat missing guidance as an adaptation gap rather than inventing a company rule.
• Prefer a precise, bounded recommendation over a broad generic rewrite.
• Use supplied terminology consistently across the document, sheet, and any derivative copy.
• Do not infer performance, customer behavior, product capability, or market response from wording alone.
• Make every unresolved issue actionable by naming the missing decision, evidence, owner, or source.
• Keep factual claims traceable even when the final copy is concise.
• Recheck that counts, names, dates, and identifiers match across all outputs.
• Mark hypotheses as hypotheses and preserve competing explanations when evidence is mixed.
• Use the stated acceptance criteria as the final completeness check.