Internal-link analyser

How to use it

1. 1Enter the address you want to checkType or paste it into the field marked "Address to check", including the https:// at the front. Start at the home page. Internal linking is a property of the whole site, so a partial crawl gives a partial answer.
2. 2Press Check and wait a few secondsThe request runs from our server rather than from your browser, so your cache, your extensions and your login session cannot affect the answer. That is the point of it: you are seeing what an anonymous visitor sees.
3. 3Set how much of the site to visitMax pages and max depth bound the crawl, and the sitemap toggle decides whether we seed from sitemap.xml as well as from links. Start small — fifty pages tells you most of what a thousand will, and it is somebody else's server.
4. 4Read why it stopped before you read the numbersA crawl that hit your page cap has not seen the site, and every count below is "out of what we visited" rather than "out of your site". The result says which of the two happened, because reporting our own limit as your site's problem is a crawler's oldest failure mode.
5. 5Look at what nothing links toPages with no inbound internal links are the headline finding. Note the wording carefully: they are only called orphans when the crawl saw the whole site AND every page's full link list. Otherwise they are CANDIDATES, and the result says so.
6. 6Check depth from the home pageHow many clicks a page sits from the start is reported per page. Anything four or five deep is hard for both readers and crawlers to reach, and is usually reachable in two if somebody links to it deliberately.
7. 7Read the uninformative anchors listLinks whose text is "click here" or "read more" tell nobody what is on the other side. Matching is exact — "learn more about our pricing" is a good anchor and is left alone.
8. 8Share or keep the result within 24 hoursThe result has its own link you can send to whoever needs to act on it. It is deleted 24 hours after the check ran, so save anything you need to keep — and re-run the check after a change rather than trusting an old link.

About this tool

Your internal links are how you tell search engines which of your pages matter, and how visitors move between them. This crawls your site and builds the graph: how many links point at each page, how many leave it, how many clicks it sits from where we started, and which links describe their destination badly.

The number that cannot come from anywhere else is inbound links. A page's inbound links live on every other page, so no amount of looking at the page itself will find them. "Nothing on your site links to your pricing page" is a sentence only a crawl can produce.

Understanding the result

The table is sorted by inbound links, most first. That order is your site's own opinion about which of its pages matter — read it against the pages you think matter, and the mismatches are the interesting part.

"Links in" counts every internal link pointing at a page, and "Followed" counts the ones not marked nofollow. When those two differ, something is linking to that page while telling search engines not to pass any weight to it. On your own pages that is almost never what anyone intended.

Depth is counted from the address you submitted, which is not the same as depth from your home page unless that is what you submitted. Start at your home page if you want the number people usually mean.

Anchor text is judged by exact match against a short list of phrases that name no destination — "click here", "read more", "learn more". A longer phrase that happens to contain one of them is left alone, because "Learn more about our pricing" is a perfectly good link and a tool that told you to rewrite it would not be worth using.

Example

https://example.com/ · at most 50 pages · sitemap on

Mapped 43 pages and 512 internal links

/pricing        28 links in
/about          14 links in
/blog/post-9     1 link in   (nofollow only)
/promo-2024      0 links in  — in sitemap, nothing links to it

17 links say "click here" or "read more"

Limitations

• The graph only contains pages this crawl reached. If a limit stopped it, an inbound-link count can be too low but never too high — and a page reported as having nothing link to it may simply be linked from a page we did not get to. The result says whether that is the case, and the orphan section changes its wording accordingly.
• Finding a page that nothing links to requires your sitemap, because a crawl that only follows links can never reach one by definition. With the sitemap option off, the orphan section says it did not look rather than showing you an empty list.
• A page linking to itself is not counted as an inbound link. Nearly every site links home from its own home page, and counting that would make every page with a logo look well connected.
• Links are read from the HTML as delivered, without running JavaScript. A menu built in the browser is invisible here, which will make pages look less linked than they are. The raw-vs-rendered tool shows the size of that gap for one page.
• We record up to 300 distinct links per page. On a page with more, the extra links are missing from the graph — the result tells you how many pages that affected, because it is the one thing that can make a page look orphaned when it is not.

Questions