How to Check Internal Links: A Step-by-Step Audit Method

What does it mean to check internal links?

Checking internal links means verifying that every page you want found receives links from your other pages, and that those links are crawlable, clearly worded and not neutralized by a nofollow. In practice: a list of pages, a count of links per page, and a review of anchors.

An accountant publishes a well-researched article on VAT for freelancers. Six months later, it has almost no impressions. The article is in the sitemap, but nothing on the site links to it: not the blog home, which only shows the last ten posts, not the related service page, not the other articles on VAT. For a visitor, it does not exist. For Google, it is a page that the rest of the site never mentions.

That is the most common internal linking problem, and the easiest to fix once you see it. The internal linking entry in our glossary covers the concept; this guide is the audit method.

Why do internal links matter for Google?

Because links are the main way Google discovers pages and understands what they are about. Its documentation describes the discovery side directly: “Other pages are discovered when Google extracts a link from a known page to a new page.” The SEO Starter Guide adds that “Google primarily finds pages through links from other pages it already crawled.”

Links also carry meaning. The anchor, the visible text of the link, “tells users and Google something about the page you’re linking to,” according to the same guide. A link written “VAT thresholds for freelancers” says much more about its destination than “read more.”

And Google sets a minimum that serves as the backbone of any audit:

What Google does not publish is a formula: no ideal number of links per page, no maximum click depth. Its link documentation says it outright: “There’s no magical ideal number of links a given page should contain.” The rest of this guide sticks to what the documentation says and labels practical rules of thumb as such.

What are the most common internal linking problems?

Five problems account for most of what an audit turns up. Each one has a clear symptom and a clear fix.

Uncrawlable links deserve a word, because they are invisible to the eye. Google’s link documentation is explicit: “Generally, Google can only crawl your link if it’s an <a> HTML element (also known as anchor element) with an href attribute.” A menu that opens pages through a JavaScript click handler, with no href, may work perfectly for a visitor and give Google nothing to follow.

Image links are a special case: for an image used as a link, Google uses the image’s alt attribute as anchor text. A logo or a thumbnail linking to an article with an empty alt is a link with no words.

How do you audit your internal links, step by step?

Work from the most serious problem to the most cosmetic: first the pages nobody links to, then the quality of existing links, then the structure.

flowchart TD
  A[List the pages that matter] --> B[Count internal links pointing to each one]
  B --> C{Zero links?}
  C -- Yes --> D[Orphan: link to it from a related page]
  C -- No --> E[Review anchors and rel on each page]
  E --> F[Check depth from the home page]
  F --> G[Add links from your strongest pages]
  G --> H[Re-check after each publication]

Step 1: list the pages that matter

Start from what you want to rank, not from what exists. Your XML sitemap is a good raw list: Google describes it as a file that lists the pages you consider important. Remove what does not need traffic (legal notices, thank-you pages, test pages), then mark your priority pages: services, products, pillar articles.

On a small site, a spreadsheet with one row per URL is enough. You will add a column for each check that follows.

Step 2: find orphan pages

An orphan page is a page that no other page on your site links to. Three ways to find them, from the most to the least complete:

1. A crawler. Any site crawler starts from the home page and follows links, like a search engine. Compare the list of URLs it finds with the list from step 1: every page in the sitemap that the crawler never reached is an orphan, or is only reachable through links it cannot follow.
2. Search Console. In the Links report, the “Top linked pages” table under internal links shows which of your pages are most linked from within your site, and selecting a URL shows the pages that link to it. Google warns that the report “isn’t a comprehensive list of every link on your site” and that tables are limited to 1,000 rows: a page missing from it is a lead to check, not a proof.
3. By hand, for a few key pages. Search your site or your CMS for the URL of the page. If no other content contains it, it is an orphan.

The sitemap does not solve the problem. Google can discover a page through it, but its sitemap documentation states the target: “If your site’s pages are properly linked, Google can usually discover most of your site.” Proper linking, in its words, means that all the pages you deem important can be reached through some form of navigation.

Step 3: review anchors and rel attributes page by page

Take your priority pages, and those that link to them, and look at each link: where it goes, what it says, and what rel it carries. This is exactly what the free internal links checker does: paste a page’s HTML, and it lists every link with its anchor text, whether it is internal or external, and its rel. It flags empty anchors, generic ones (“click here”, “read more”), URLs used as anchors, images linked without alt, internal links in nofollow, and the same anchor pointing to different pages. Everything stays in your browser.

What to look for, according to Google’s criteria:

Google suggests a simple test: read only the anchor, out of context, and check whether it is specific enough to make sense by itself. “Our services” fails; “accounting for freelancers” passes. The opposite excess also exists: Google asks you to “resist the urge to cram every keyword that’s related to the page that you’re linking to,” and reminds you that keyword stuffing violates its spam policies. Twenty links all written “best accountant Lyon” read as manipulation, not as description.

Internal nofollow. Since March 1, 2020, Google treats nofollow as a hint for crawling and indexing, as announced in its 2019 post on evolving nofollow. Its documentation reserves the value for links where you would rather Google not associate your site with, or crawl, the linked page, and adds: “For links within your own site, use the robots.txt disallow rule.” In other words, nofollow is not the tool for your own pages. If a page should not be crawled, block it in robots.txt; if it should be found, remove the nofollow. Internal nofollows often come from a theme, a plugin or an old SEO habit: check your templates, not just your articles.

Step 4: check click depth

Depth is the number of clicks needed to reach a page from the home page. Google does not set a maximum depth, so take this as a rule of thumb: the further a priority page is from the home page and your strong pages, the fewer paths lead to it, for visitors as well as for crawlers.

The classic culprit is pagination. A blog that shows ten posts per page pushes every article a little deeper each time you publish: after a year, your best article from January may only be reachable on page 8 of the archive. Three fixes, in order of effort:

• Hub pages: one page per topic that links to all the articles on that topic, linked from the main navigation or the blog home.
• Contextual links: each new article links to two or three older articles on the same topic, and you go back to the older ones to link to the new one.
• Categories that make sense: the SEO Starter Guide recommends organizing a site in a logical way, because it can help search engines and users understand how your pages relate. Google’s own example of discovery is exactly this: a hub page, such as a category page, that links to a new blog post.

Step 5: link from your strongest pages

Not every page carries the same weight for an audit. The pages that already receive traffic, impressions or external links are the best places to add a link to a page you want to push.

To find them: in Search Console, sort your pages by impressions or clicks in the Performance report, and look at the “Top linked pages” table for external links in the Links report. Then, for each priority page that is struggling, add a contextual link from one or two of those strong pages, in a paragraph where it actually helps the reader. The heading extractor is useful here: it shows a page’s H1 to H6 outline, so you can spot the section where a link to the target page fits naturally.

A practical example: the accountant from the introduction has a service page, “Accounting for freelancers,” which receives most of the site’s impressions. One sentence in its VAT section, “the VAT thresholds for freelancers change every year, here is how to check yours,” with the words “VAT thresholds for freelancers” as the link, gives the orphan article a link from the strongest page on the site, with an anchor that describes it.

Step 6: re-check after every publication

Internal linking erodes on its own: new posts push old ones down, pages get deleted, URLs change and leave broken links behind. Re-run the check on new pages when you publish them, and run a full audit at regular intervals.

Internal links audit checklist

Use it page by page for your priority pages, then once a quarter for the whole site.

Which tool should you use to check internal links?

It depends on the scale of the question. To review the links of one page, a page checker is enough. To find orphans across a whole site, you need a crawl compared with your list of pages.

A good routine for a small site: the crawler or Search Console once a quarter for the structure, and the internal links checker on every new or updated page before it goes live.

Internal linking is also what makes content clusters work: a pillar article linked to its satellites, and the satellites linked back to the pillar. If you produce content with AI, the guide AI content and Google covers what to review before publishing, and WordPress blog on autopilot with AI shows how to keep control of the chain, internal links included.