Link equity (the value passed through internal links) flows through a site like water through a network of pipes. The structure of those pipes — which pages link to which — determines how authority distributes.
Most sites, examined honestly, have a topology that evolved by accident rather than strategy. Common broken patterns:
Hourglass topology: the homepage has many links in and out, a few category pages have moderate links, but most content pages are isolated dead ends with minimal internal links pointing to them. Link equity pools at the top and doesn't flow down to where it matters for rankings.
Star topology: everything links to the homepage. Useful for home page authority. Useless for everything else.
Random topology: links added as content was created, with no strategy for which pages should receive the most equity. The result is a tangled graph where high-authority pages point to low-value content and high-value commercial pages have minimal internal links.
The right topology for an affiliate site: hub-and-spoke with horizontal connections. Category hubs link to subcategory hubs and then to specific review/comparison pages. Importantly, review pages link to each other where relevant — don't treat leaf pages as endpoints.
Audit your internal link graph with a tool like Screaming Frog or Ahrefs internal link report. Visualize it. If it looks random, it performs randomly.
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Link equity distribution: why most sites have a broken topology.
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