<b>The internal-link injection ruleset</b>

<b>The internal-link injection ruleset</b>

Automated internal linking goes wrong when every page links to every page. Constrain it.

The five guardrails for an auto-linker:

1. Cap — max 8 contextual internal links per generated page. Owner: dev. Gate: hard limit in code, not a guideline.

2. Relevance floor — only link entities sharing at least one taxonomy node (same category, region, or attribute). Gate: no shared node, no link.

3. Anchor variation — pull anchors from 3 templates minimum so 50k pages don't all use the identical phrase. Gate: exact-match anchor share under 40 percent.

4. Reciprocity check — avoid A→B and B→A on every pair; it creates a flat mesh with no hierarchy. Gate: link up to hubs more than sideways.

5. Orphan sweep — weekly job lists pages with zero inbound internal links. Gate: orphan count must trend to zero.

— A flat all-to-all mesh tells Google nothing about importance
— Hub-and-spoke beats peer-to-peer for crawl prioritization

Ship gate: don't publish the linker until all 5 guardrails return green.