Internal linking for Arabic and bilingual sites

Internal links are the roads between your own pages: they help readers move to the next useful article and help Google discover pages and understand what they are about. Google’s link documentation boils the goal down to one sentence: every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site.

The problem in plain words

Most Arabic blogs I look at have plenty of content and very few deliberate links. New posts appear on the homepage for a few days, slide into page 9 of the archive, and from then on the only path to them is the sitemap or a lucky search. Readers never find the deeper guide that answers their next question.

Bilingual sites add a second problem: the two sections grow at different speeds, so an English article may link to three related posts while its Arabic sibling links to none.

How Google treats links

• Only real links count as links. Google writes that it “can only crawl your link if it’s an <a> HTML element with an href attribute.” A button, a span with an onclick handler or a router attribute without href is not a link Google can follow.
• JavaScript is fine if the output is right. Links “are also crawlable when you use JavaScript to insert them into a page dynamically as long as it uses the HTML markup shown above.”
• Anchor text matters for context. Google says good anchor text “is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it’s on,” and it lists generic phrases such as “click here” as examples of text that is too generic.
• nofollow has a narrow purpose. Google’s guidance reserves nofollow for links to sources you don’t trust, and advises against applying it to every external link.

Here is the difference in markup. Note that the Arabic path is percent encoded in the href, which is the form a browser actually sends.

<!-- Crawlable: an a element with href and descriptive Arabic anchor text -->
<a href="https://example.com/ar/%D8%AF%D9%84%D9%8A%D9%84-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%A8%D8%B7-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AF%D8%A7%D8%AE%D9%84%D9%8A%D8%A9/">دليل الروابط الداخلية للمواقع العربية</a>
<!-- Not crawlable: no a element, no href -->
<span onclick="openPage('guide')">اضغط هنا</span>

Step by step

1. List the pages you care about. Start with your most important pages in each language: cornerstone guides, product or service pages, and posts that already bring search traffic in the Search Console Performance report.
2. Build hub pages. For each main topic, choose one page that explains it broadly and links to the detailed posts under it; each post links back to the hub and to a close sibling. This is an editorial habit, not a Google rule, but it guarantees important pages a link.
3. Rewrite your anchors. Replace “اضغط هنا” or “المزيد” with words that describe the target, for example “طريقة إعداد hreflang للعربية والإنجليزية”. You do not need the exact keyword, just a short phrase that tells the reader what they will get.
4. Link from inside the text. A link in the paragraph where the reader needs it carries clearer context than a footer link.
5. Connect the language versions. Give each Arabic article a visible link to its English sibling and the reverse, usually through a language switcher in the header. Pair this with hreflang annotations, which we covered in our December guide on Arabic and English sites.
6. Find orphan pages. Crawl your site and compare the URLs found through links with those in your sitemap. Anything only in the sitemap needs a link.
7. Check your theme’s navigation. In RTL themes, make sure breadcrumbs, related posts widgets and mobile menus output real <a href> links, not JavaScript click handlers. View the rendered HTML with the URL Inspection tool if you are unsure.
8. Maintain. Every few months, run the crawler again, fix broken internal links and update links that point to redirected URLs so they go straight to the final address.

An example from a bilingual site

Picture a small bilingual coffee blog with an Arabic section under /ar/ and an English one under /en/. The Arabic hub page “دليل القهوة المختصة” links to eight Arabic posts on brewing methods, each with an anchor that names the method. Each of those posts links back to the hub in its first paragraph and to the next method at the end. In the header, a switcher labeled “English” points to the matching English post, and the English post has a switcher labeled “العربية” pointing back.

What caught my attention when mapping links like this is how quickly it exposes gaps: an Arabic post with no English sibling, or a hub that promises ten methods and links to six. Linking work doubles as a content audit.

Checklist

Common mistakes

• “اضغط هنا” anchors. They tell neither readers nor Google what is on the other side. Google names this kind of text as too generic.
• JavaScript navigation without href. A menu built from click handlers can leave whole sections without crawlable links.
• Pages reachable only from the sitemap. If no internal link points to a page, readers cannot find it either.
• Linking to redirected URLs. Old links still work through the redirect, but updating them saves a hop.
• nofollow on internal links. Google’s guidance limits nofollow to sources you don’t trust. Your own pages are not in that group.

My view: there is no magic number of links per page. Add a link when it helps the reader take the next step, and skip it when it does not.

Sources

• Google Search Central, documentation on making links crawlable and writing anchor text, consulted 10 March 2026, https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/links-crawlable
• Google Search Central, SEO Starter Guide, consulted 10 March 2026, https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide