Why internal links matter
Internal links are how crawlers discover your pages and how they learn what each page is about. The anchor text of a link is a short description of the target, written by you. A new article with no links pointing at it is hard to find; a key product page linked from twenty places with vague anchors like “click here” is harder to understand than it needs to be.
What this checker reports
There are two modes. This page lists every link on one page. Whole site reads up to 50 pages, found through your sitemap (via robots.txt or /sitemap.xml) or by following links when there’s no sitemap, and shows how they link to each other: inbound links per page (fewest and most), orphan candidates, the anchor text used for each internal URL, and nofollow on internal links, with CSV downloads. On one page, you get:
- Counts. Internal links (same host, with or without www), other subdomains, external links, and mailto/tel/javascript links, with unique URL totals.
- Anchor text. Every internal and external link with its text. Image links show the image’s alt text; icon links fall back to aria-label or title.
- rel values. nofollow, sponsored and ugc counts, and a warning for nofollow on your own internal links.
- Generic and empty anchors. “Read more”, “here”, and links with no text at all.
- Homepage link. We fetch your homepage and check whether it links to this page. It’s a hint about how prominent the page is, not proof it’s an orphan.
Building a good internal link structure
- Link from pages that already get traffic to the pages you want to grow.
- Use the target’s topic as anchor text, varied naturally. “SEO for startups”, not “this post”.
- Give every new page at least a few links from related pages the day it ships.
- Keep hubs (like a tools or blog index) linked from the main navigation so everything is a few clicks deep.
Our own writer contract requires at least three internal links per article, and a quality gate checks them before anything ships. The rest of that pipeline is in the Versely case study. To make sure every link here resolves, run the broken link checker.
Limits
We read the server HTML without running JavaScript, so menus rendered client-side won’t appear. We analyse the first 2,000 links on each page. The whole-site mode stops at 50 pages or about 20 seconds, whichever comes first, and says so when it stops early. Its counts only cover the pages it read: a page that looks weakly linked may get more links from pages we didn’t reach.