Organize the site into hub-and-spoke clusters: one hub page per topic, every supporting page linking up to its hub and sideways to a few siblings, and the hub linking down to all of them. Then route links from your strongest pages toward the pages that make money.
Where large cannabis sites go wrong
A dispensary site with 500 products and 200 blog posts usually has a navigation bar, a footer, and almost nothing else connecting its pages. Products are reachable only through category pagination. Blog posts link out to nobody. Authority pools in the homepage and two or three categories while the strain pages that could actually convert sit four or five clicks deep, starved. Internal linking is the one ranking lever you control completely, and most large sites barely touch it.
Hub-and-spoke is the working model
Give every topic a hub — a category page or pillar guide that targets the head term — and treat everything related as spokes. Each spoke links up to its hub and sideways to two or three siblings; the hub links down to every spoke. This library is built that way: 500 guides organized into 12 clusters, each guide linking to its cluster hub and to related guides in the sidebar, so nothing sits more than two clicks from the blog index. The same shape works for a menu. The flower category is a hub. Strain pages, brand pages, and flower-related guides are its spokes.
Anchor text does real work
The words inside the link tell Google what the destination is about, so spend them. Link to a strain page with the strain's name, to a category with the category term, to a guide with what the guide answers. Never burn an anchor on click here or read more. And vary the phrasing: a thousand identical exact-match anchors pointing at one page reads as a template, and templates get discounted.
Send strength where the money is
Internal links pass authority from page to page, and your pages are not equal donors. Open Search Console, sort by clicks and impressions, and note which pages Google already trusts. Those are your senders. Add contextual links from them to the categories and products you need ranking. The homepage is the most powerful slot on the site; the handful of links it gives to categories or a featured strain matter more than fifty links from thin pages nobody visits.
Find orphans before they cost you
Run a crawler such as Screaming Frog against the site and compare the crawl to your sitemap. Pages in the sitemap that the crawl never reaches are orphans — they exist, but no path leads to them, and their rankings show it. The same crawl gives you click depth. Anything you care about sitting deeper than three or four clicks needs a new link from somewhere shallow: a hub, a related guide, or the homepage itself.
A worked example
A multi-state brand came to us with 40 strain pages and 120 blog posts living in separate worlds. Not one post linked to a strain page. We mapped every post to the strains it mentioned, added three to five in-body links per post with the strain names as anchors, and built four strain-family hubs to sit between the blog and the menu. No new content, no new backlinks — just connections. The strain pages went from crawl afterthoughts to some of the most-linked pages on the domain, and the family hubs began ranking for the genetics terms the blog had been quietly accumulating authority on for years.
Frequently asked questions
How many internal links should a page have?
There is no magic count. The useful question is coverage: does every page you care about receive contextual links from pages that already get crawled and ranked? Three relevant in-content links beat a hundred footer links.
Do sidebar and footer links count?
They keep pages crawlable, but links repeated across every template carry less weight than links placed inside body copy. Use templates for reachability and contextual links for meaning and priority.
What is a hub page on a dispensary site?
Usually a category page: flower, edibles, a strain family, a brand. The hub targets the head term, links down to every product and article in its cluster, and collects the links those pages send back up.
How often should internal links be audited?
Quarterly on a large site, plus after any migration or menu overhaul. Comparing a fresh crawl against the sitemap catches orphans, broken links, and depth creep before the rankings show the damage.
Key takeaways
- Hub-and-spoke: every topic gets a hub, every spoke links up and sideways, the hub links down.
- Descriptive anchors only; the link text is a ranking signal you control on every page.
- Route links from your GSC top pages and homepage toward categories and products that convert.
- Crawl for orphans and click depth; important pages deeper than three or four clicks need new paths.
Want this done for your brand?
We build cannabis & CBD search visibility with full transparency, for dispensaries, brands, and MSOs.
Get a free cannabis SEO audit ›