18 Aug 2026 · 5 min read · All posts
Every SEO forum has this question and every answer is a number pulled from the air. Three. Five. Ten. One per hundred words.
The number is wrong because the question is wrong. Link count is not the variable. Link density is.
Five internal links in a 300-word post is spam. Five in a 3,000-word guide is thin. The same count, opposite problems — which tells you the count was never the thing that mattered.
A working range is two to five internal links per thousand words. On a 1,200-word article that is roughly two to six links. On a 4,000-word pillar page, eight to twenty.
| Word count | Sensible range |
|---|---|
| 500 | 1–3 |
| 1,000 | 2–5 |
| 2,000 | 4–10 |
| 4,000 | 8–20 |
Two reasons, one technical and one human.
The technical one: whatever authority a page passes is divided among its outbound links. Forty links means each destination gets a fortieth. You are not distributing more value by linking more often, you are diluting it.
The human one matters more. Links are visual interruptions. Every one asks the reader whether to leave. A paragraph with four links in it is not a paragraph, it is a menu — and readers stop following any of them.
A long article with two internal links is a dead end. The reader finishes and has nowhere to go, so they leave. Meanwhile every page you did not link to stays invisible.
The floor is not about search engines at all. It is about whether your site behaves like a body of work or a pile of documents.
Spread through the body, not clustered. Three links in the opening paragraph and none after is worse than the same three spaced across the article, because early links get clicked before the reader has any reason to trust them.
Avoid linking the same destination twice in one page. The second link adds nothing and splits the signal your anchor text is sending.
If you cannot justify a link by pointing at the sentence and saying "a reader here would want this", it should not exist — regardless of what the density calculation permits.
Density is a ceiling, not a target.
Prakam does this automatically. Crawl your site, see every suggested link in its real sentence, approve the ones you agree with. Free for one site.
FAQ
Two to five internal links per thousand words is a sound working range. On a 1,200-word article that is roughly two to six links; on a 4,000-word pillar page, eight to twenty.
Yes. Whatever authority a page passes is divided among its outbound links, so forty links means each destination receives a fortieth. More importantly, links are visual interruptions and readers stop following any of them when a paragraph becomes a menu.