Why I added internal linking to my image converter (and what changed in Google)

I've been building Convertify — a free image converter powered by Rust + libvips. Two weeks in, Google had indexed 18 of my 186 static pages. The numbers were moving, but slowly. Then I read a recommendation that changed my approach: internal linking is 80% of cluster SEO. The problem My converter pages existed in isolation. /heic-to-jpg had no idea /heic-to-png existed. Google couldn't see a cluster — just a collection of unrelated tools. What I built A RelatedConversions component that generates contextual links on every page: const RELATED : Record < string , string [] > = { heic : [ " jpg " , " png " , " webp " , " avif " ], avif : [ " jpg " , " png " , " webp " , " heic " ], // ... }; export default function RelatedConversions ({ from , to }) { // generates links like "HEIC to PNG", "WEBP to JPG" etc. // deduplicates, shows related formats from both source and target } On the homepage — "Popular Conversions". On converter pages — "Related Conversions". Every page now links to 6-8