Page-level internal link audit
Paste a public URL. I’ll pull every link off it, split the real internal pages from the external and junk links, ping a sample for status and redirects, flag the lazy anchors. Then you get a CSV you can actually work from. It’s what I run before I touch a hub. Or before I move a page in a migration and dread what I’ll find.
One page at a time. The same-site status sample is capped so the thing stays fast. I point it at hubs, evergreen guides, anything I just dragged across in a migration.
What an internal link checker should show on one page
Internal links pull double duty. They walk a reader from this page to the next page worth reading. They also show crawlers how the whole site hangs together. So a raw count? Tells you basically nothing. What I want to see is the destination and the anchor text, whether the target is genuinely on your site, whether the link even sits in the HTML where a crawler can reach it. And whether any of the same-site links that matter now redirect or 404 on you.
I built this for the pages I actually care about. Tool hubs, category hubs, tutorials, landing pages, the stuff that got shuffled in a migration. It reads the real anchors out of the HTML the browser gets back. It buckets the utility stuff (mailto, fragment jumps), clusters internal destinations that show up more than once, samples live status and redirect chains. And here’s the part most tools quietly skip: it leaves the sketchy anchors right out in the open instead of burying them under a tidy little score.
Anchor text and destination quality belong together
An anchor can be perfectly valid and still tell nobody anything. Empty links. Image-only links with no fallback text. The same vague label fifteen times over, nav noise that got copied into the body. All of it makes the audit harder than it has any right to be. And the destination counts just as much. When an internal link routes through an old redirect or a dead path, you’re making readers and crawlers take the scenic route to a page you fully control. That one always bugs me, maybe more than it should.
- Inventory lists every link it pulled, and tells you flat out whether each one is same-site.
- Anchor review drags the empty, vague, repeated, nofollow links into the light.
- Status sample hits a set of unique internal destinations and counts the redirect hops.
- CSV copy is the little handoff list I work through to fix anchors and destinations one at a time.
- Scope mode lets you pick the exact host. Or treat www and non-www as one family.
A practical internal linking workflow
- Pick a hub or article that’s meant to push people deeper into the site. Start there.
- Look at the unique internal destinations first. The total link count barely matters.
- Kill the broken links and the old redirected URLs. You own the source page, so just point it straight at the real thing.
- Then rewrite the vague or empty anchors, especially on the links that carry real weight.
- After a migration, don’t stop here. Run the sitemap and broken-link checks too, and the canonical one while you’re at it.
Common questions
Does more internal linking always mean better SEO?
No. I’ve watched people learn that one the hard way. A handful of genuinely relevant links beats a wall of the same link stamped everywhere. If a link doesn’t help a reader, and doesn’t make it obvious why those two pages even relate, it’s just noise.
Why only sample statuses?
One page can spray out hundreds of links once you count the nav and the widgets. Most of them repeat anyway. Checking every single one would crawl to a halt. So I sample unique destinations instead. The tool stays quick, and you still catch the redirects and errors that actually matter on the pages you care about.
Should I keep internal links that redirect?
Redirects are great for catching old URLs people still have bookmarked. But when you own the page doing the linking? Just point it at the real, current destination. No reason to bounce your own readers through a 301 you could’ve skipped.
Why do internal links matter for SEO?
They pass ranking signal around your site. They’re how search engines stumble onto pages in the first place. And the way you link quietly tells Google which pages you think matter most. Honestly? I’ve seen a solid internal structure move rankings more than chasing fresh backlinks ever did. Could be my niche, but it keeps happening.
How many internal links should a page have?
There’s no magic number. Anyone who hands you one is guessing. My rule of thumb: every page that matters should sit a few clicks from the homepage, with a few in-context links pointing at it. Pages with zero internal links coming in? They almost never rank.
What is an orphan page?
It’s a page nothing on your own site links to. Search engines struggle to find it, and struggle even harder to decide it’s worth anything. The fix is dull but it works: link to it from a related article or a hub, and pull it back into the structure.
