How can internal linking be optimized for news sites?

I focus on making internal linking clear and useful for news sites. I link related articles to guide readers through a story and add context. I use descriptive anchor texts so users and search engines understand what the linked page covers. I create evergreen cornerstone articles that support new content and link back to them often. I regularly update links to avoid broken paths and keep relevance. I place links where they add value, such as "Read More" or related stories sections. This keeps readers engaged and helps search engines crawl the site better.

The question I want to ask you guys is that How do you handle internal linking for your news site?

on news volume doing it manual is impossible. i script it: crawl with screaming frog, export the urls, and use embeddings to find the closest related articles for each new post, then auto insert 3-4 links. the manual part i keep only for the cornerstone pages.

Two things made the biggest difference for me in high-volume publishing.

Link by query, not by topic. Pull the GSC query data for the pages you already have. Find the ones ranking 5–20 for a term and use the query as an anchor to point new articles at those. The embedding-based "closest related article" feature is good for relevance, but it doesn't know which page is close to ranking.

Cap inbound links per target. It's easy to end up with 40 internal links pointing to one cornerstone page and two to everything else. I keep a crawl export next to the GSC export so I can see the inbound count per URL and distribute them deliberately.

For news articles specifically, the automatic "related stories" block at the bottom is far less effective than one contextual link in the second or third paragraph. It's the same page, but with very different weight.

I usually keep internal linking fairly simple on news sites. I link from newer stories to the most relevant background or evergreen piece, especially when a topic is likely to develop over time. I also try to use natural anchor text rather than forcing keywords. One thing I’ve found useful is revisiting older articles after publishing a major update and adding links to the newer coverage. It helps readers follow the story while also keeping the site structure connected.

I also keep an eye on search console's internal-links report to see which pages are receiving links and whether important content is getting overlooked.