Quick answer
An internal link audit crawls your site to find orphan pages, buried pages, broken or redirected links and weak anchor text. Google follows crawlable a-href links, so fix link markup first, then link every important page from relevant pages with descriptive anchors. Prioritise service and product pages, and re-crawl to confirm.
Key takeaways
- Google generally follows only anchor elements with an href attribute, so links built with scripts or non-standard attributes can be invisible to crawlers.
- Google's guidance says every page you care about should be linked from at least one other page on your site, placed in context.
- Good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to both pages, while generic phrases like "click here" waste the signal.
- There's no ideal number of links per page, but Google says that if a page seems to have too many, it probably does.
- A good audit ends with a prioritised list of links to add, change or remove, mapped to the pages that earn enquiries.
Why do internal links matter so much?
External links get the glamour. Internal links do the quiet, daily work of telling search engines and visitors how your site fits together. Every link from one of your pages to another says "this is related, and this is worth a look." Get them right and the right pages get found, understood and trusted. Get them wrong and good pages sit in the dark.
Here's the nice part: internal links are entirely in your control. No outreach, no permission, no waiting for anyone else. An afternoon of careful work can lift important pages in ways that months of content creation can't, simply because nothing was pointing at them.
What does Google say about links?
Google's documentation, Link best practices for Google, last updated on 10 December 2025, makes two points that frame the whole audit. First, Google generally follows only anchor elements with an href attribute. Second, every page you care about should be linked from at least one other page on your site, placed in context.
Both are testable. You can check how links are built, and you can check which pages have none. That's most of an audit.
What links do for crawlers
They create paths. A crawler discovers pages by following links, and it learns what a page is about partly from the text of the links pointing to it.
What does a good internal link do for visitors?
It answers the question "what next?" A reader on a guide about local SEO who sees a link to a relevant service page gets a natural next step. A reader on a service page who finds a link to a helpful guide gets reassurance. Good links serve people first, and search engines benefit as a result.
That's why the best audits think about journeys as well as pages. Where do visitors come in, where would they logically go next and does the site make that easy?
Links as editorial judgement
Each link is a recommendation. Too many dilute it. Too few leave readers stranded.
What do you need before you start?
An internal link audit needs three ingredients: a map of the site, a list of the pages that matter most and a place to record findings. Gather them first.
Preparation takes thirty minutes and shapes everything.
Which tools help?
A crawler such as Screaming Frog or Sitebulb to extract the link graph, with columns for source, destination, anchor text, link position and status. Google Search Console, whose links report shows top linked pages and top linking pages from Google's perspective. Analytics, to see which pages matter commercially. And a spreadsheet to combine everything.
You can do a basic audit for free. Paid tools help on larger sites, but they don't replace judgement about which pages deserve links.
Crawl as Googlebot would
Configure the crawler to respect robots.txt and, if your site relies on JavaScript, to render pages. Otherwise, you'll miss links that exist only after scripts run.
Which pages are your priorities?
List the pages that earn or should earn business: your main service pages, product and category pages, location pages with real content, key guides that attract and convert and your contact page. Rank them by commercial value. That list is the lens for the audit. A link problem on a priority page matters far more than the same problem on a legal notice.
Add the pages that have grown organically and deserve more support, and the ones you plan to promote soon. The audit is about aligning links with goals.
| Priority tier | Examples | Linking goal |
|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 | Core service and product pages | Many contextual links, prominent navigation |
| Tier 2 | Supporting guides, case studies | Linked from related Tier 1 and Tier 2 pages |
| Tier 3 | Utility and legal pages | Footer links are enough |
Keep the list short
Ten to twenty priority pages is plenty for most small sites. Focus beats completeness.
Step one: are your links built so Google can follow them?
Before counting links, check that they're real. A link Google can't follow isn't a link, whatever it looks like on screen.
Google's guidance is specific, and testing is quick.
What does a crawlable link look like?
Google's documentation says it generally follows only anchor elements with an href attribute. Recommended examples include a plain anchor with a relative or absolute path. Not recommended are constructs such as a span with an href attribute, an anchor that relies on a script click handler to navigate, or javascript: URLs. Links inserted by JavaScript can work if they use the same markup.
If your navigation, buttons or cards use scripts instead of real anchors, crawlers may not follow them. That's a design and development issue, and it's the first thing to check on modern sites.
A quick test
View the page source or the rendered HTML and search for the link. Is it an anchor with an href pointing to a real address? If not, ask your developer to change it.
How do you test JavaScript-inserted links?
Use the URL Inspection tool's live test to view the rendered HTML Google sees, and confirm that the links and their anchor text appear. Google's page recommends exactly this for JavaScript-inserted anchor text. If links appear in your browser but not in the rendered HTML, crawlers may be missing them.
The guide to JavaScript SEO and rendering checks explains how to test and what to do when content or links go missing.
Don't forget images
For image links, the image's alt text serves as the anchor text. Make sure it describes the destination, and that decorative images aren't the only clickable element for an important link.
Step two: which pages are orphans or buried?
Orphans are pages no one links to. Buried pages are linked, but only from deep in the site. Both send weak signals, and both are common.
Finding them is the most revealing part of many audits.
How do you find orphan pages?
Compare two lists. The first is every URL you know exists: from your sitemap, your CMS, analytics and Search Console. The second is every URL your crawler reaches by following links from the homepage. Pages on the first list but not the second are orphan candidates.
Check each one. Some are intentionally unlinked, such as thank-you pages and test pages. Others are real content that nobody added to navigation or related links. Decide whether to link, merge or remove each.
Why orphans often appear
Redesigns that change navigation, blog posts published without categories, old campaign pages and landing pages built for ads and then forgotten.
What about click depth?
Click depth is the number of clicks needed to reach a page from the homepage. Key pages should usually be within three clicks. Deeper isn't automatically bad, but it's worth checking, because pages buried far from the homepage tend to receive less attention from crawlers and visitors.
Export click depth from your crawler, filter your priority pages and look at the outliers. A service page at depth five needs better links from higher up. The principles of shallow, logical structure are in the guide to website architecture and internal links.
Navigation is not the only route
Contextual links within content, hub pages and related-content blocks can reduce click depth without redesigning the menu.
Step three: what's wrong with the links you have?
Having links isn't the same as having good links. The third check looks for broken, redirecting and wasteful ones.
They're easy to find and satisfying to fix.
How do you find broken and redirected internal links?
In your crawler, filter internal links by destination status. Any link to a 404 or 5xx page is broken and should be fixed or removed. Any link to a redirecting URL is a candidate for updating to the final destination, which saves a hop and avoids chains. Look for links to http versions of pages, to non-preferred hosts or to old URLs.
Fixing these takes little effort and improves crawl efficiency and user experience at once. For the redirects themselves, the guide to 301 redirects and redirect mapping explains how to keep them clean.
Update the source, not just the redirect
A redirect is a safety net. The link should point straight to the right page.
Are there nofollow, noindex or blocked destinations?
Check whether internal links point to pages that carry noindex, are blocked by robots.txt or are canonicalised elsewhere. Linking prominently to a noindexed or blocked page sends contradictory signals and wastes link value. Also check for internal links marked nofollow. Google's guidance is to use nofollow only when you don't trust the source, and not for every link, so internal nofollow is rarely sensible.
If you find important pages linked only through nofollow or from pages that are themselves noindexed, fix the structure so they're reachable through normal indexed pages. The effects of directives are explained in the guide to the noindex tag.
Check canonical destinations
Internal links should point to the canonical URL, not to parameter or duplicate versions. Otherwise you're sending equity to the wrong address.
Step four: how good is your anchor text?
Anchor text is the visible, clickable words of a link. It tells readers and crawlers what to expect on the other side, and it's often the weakest part of a site's linking.
Google's guidance is clear about what works.
What does good anchor text look like?
Google's documentation says anchor text should be descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to both pages. Generic phrases such as "click here" and "read more" are poor choices, and a useful test is whether the anchor text makes sense when read alone. For example, "how to check whether a page is indexed" tells you far more than "here".
Descriptive doesn't mean stuffed. The same page warns that keyword stuffing in anchor text violates spam policies. Write naturally, as you'd explain where the link goes to a friend.
| Weak anchor | Better anchor | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Click here | how to diagnose a soft 404 | Describes the destination |
| Read more | technical SEO consultant services | Names the page's purpose |
| This page | the guide to sitemap errors | Gives context |
| Best SEO London cheap | SEO consultant in London | Natural, not stuffed |
Context matters too
Google's page recommends keeping surrounding sentence context and avoiding adjacent links jammed together. Place links where a reader would naturally want them.
How do you audit anchors at scale?
Export all internal links with their anchor text from your crawler. Sort by destination and look at the anchors pointing to each priority page. Are they varied, descriptive and relevant? Or is it all "read more" and the page title repeated? Count how many links use generic anchors and list the worst offenders.
Then plan improvements: update generic anchors in high-traffic content, add descriptive links from relevant pages and avoid making every anchor identical. Natural variation is healthy.
Navigation and footer anchors
Menus and footers repeat across every page, so wording there carries weight. Make labels clear and specific, such as "Local SEO consultant" rather than "Services".
Step five: do priority pages get enough support?
Now combine the findings with your priority list. This is where the audit turns into a plan.
The question is simple: does each important page receive the links it deserves?
How do you check link support?
For each priority page, count the internal links pointing to it, note the pages they come from and check their quality. A link from the homepage or a strong hub counts for more than one from an obscure archive. Look at whether links come from relevant pages, which makes them more useful for readers and for relevance.
Search Console's links report lists top linked pages internally, which shows where Google sees the most emphasis. Compare it with your priorities. If a minor page outranks a service page for internal links, rebalance.
Google's guidance on quantity
Google's page says there's no ideal number, and that a page with what seems like too many links probably has too many. Aim for relevance and usefulness, not volume.
What does a linking plan look like?
A spreadsheet with columns for the target page, the source pages that should link to it, the suggested anchor text, the placement and the status. For each priority page, identify three to five relevant pages that should link to it and add the links in context. Include new content: when you publish a guide, decide in advance which service pages and related guides will link to it and which pages it will link to in return.
This is the heart of topical structure, where guides support service pages and service pages support each other. The method is similar to the one in the guide on creating a topical map for a service business.
| Target page | Source pages | Anchor idea | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Technical SEO consultant | Technical guides, audit page | technical SEO consultant | To do |
| SEO audit | Checklist guides, pricing page | SEO audit | Done |
| Local SEO consultant | Local guides, location pages | local SEO consultant | In progress |
How do you prioritise and carry out the fixes?
You'll finish the audit with a long list. The art is knowing what to do first, and how to implement without breaking things.
Score and sequence.
How do you score the findings?
Rate each by impact, effort and risk. High impact might be a priority page with no internal links, a large number of broken links on key pages or links built so crawlers can't follow them. Low effort might be updating anchor text or adding a few contextual links. Do high-impact, low-effort fixes first.
Group changes into batches: markup fixes for developers, content edits for editors, navigation changes for designers. Each batch gets an owner and a date. For complex sites, a specialist SEO audit can produce the scored list and the developer tickets.
Start with the money pages
Improving the linking to your top five commercial pages often delivers more than a sitewide clean-up.
What's a safe way to make changes?
Make link edits in small batches. After each, re-crawl the affected area and confirm the changes. For template or navigation changes, test on staging first. Keep a change log with dates, URLs and reasons, so any shift in performance can be traced.
Avoid mass changes to navigation without testing, because they affect every page. And avoid removing links wholesale to "tidy up" before you know what they're doing. Remove with a reason.
Don't forget the sitemap
Make sure new pages added to the link structure are also in the sitemap and that the sitemap lists only canonical, indexable pages.
How do you build linking into your publishing routine?
An audit fixes the past. A routine protects the future. Without one, new content drifts into orphan territory within months.
A short checklist at publication time does the job.
What goes into a pre-publish checklist?
Before publishing any page, check: which existing pages should link to this one, and have those links been added? Which pages should this page link to, using descriptive anchors? Is it reachable from navigation, a hub or a related-content block? Is it in the sitemap? Does it use real anchor links?
Add a line for linking to every content brief, and make it part of the editor's sign-off. It takes five minutes per page and prevents most orphan pages.
Link back to older content
When a new page is relevant to older popular pages, add links to it from those pages. It lifts the new page and refreshes the old.
How often should you re-audit?
A light check each quarter: crawl, look for new orphans, broken links and drifting click depth, and fix what you find. A full audit once a year, or after a redesign or migration. Include internal links in your release checklist, because changes to templates and navigation can quietly break them.
A steady routine keeps the link structure healthy with very little effort, and it compounds. Each well-placed link makes the next piece of content easier to find.
What does a worked example look like?
An example makes the process concrete. This one is hypothetical, built from common patterns, with illustrative details.
It follows a small professional services firm.
What did the audit find?
The firm had fifty pages: twelve services, twenty guides and a handful of case studies and utility pages. A crawl showed that four service pages had only a footer link, that eight guides were orphans after a blog redesign and that the main menu used script-driven dropdowns with no real anchors for the sub-items. Many internal links used "read more" as anchor text, and a dozen pointed to redirecting URLs from before a migration.
Search Console's links report showed the contact page as the most internally linked URL, ahead of every service page.
The pattern
A site that looked connected to visitors but offered crawlers a thin, confusing map.
What was the fix?
The developer rebuilt the dropdowns with real anchor links. The team added contextual links from relevant guides to the four weak service pages and linked each orphan guide from its topic hub and two related pages. They rewrote generic anchors on the highest-traffic pages, updated links to redirected URLs and added a linking line to the publishing checklist.
After a re-crawl confirmed the changes, service pages showed far more internal links and no orphans remained. Over the following weeks, impressions for the service pages rose and the crawl showed fewer wasted requests. The firm hadn't written new content. It had simply connected what it already had, which is exactly what a good internal link audit does.
The takeaway
Make links crawlable, give every important page a route in, write descriptive anchors and keep doing it. The site gets easier to use and easier to understand.
How do you handle internal links on blogs, guides and content hubs?
Content sites face a particular challenge: new articles arrive constantly, and without discipline they scatter into disconnected piles. A few habits make a content library behave like a coherent resource.
The aim is a web where each piece strengthens the others.
How should guides link to service pages?
Each guide should link naturally to the service page it supports, in a sentence where the reader would plausibly want it. A guide on diagnosing indexing problems might link to a technical SEO service when it mentions that complex cases benefit from specialist help. Keep these links honest and helpful, not pushy, and vary the anchors.
Avoid placing the same keyword-rich link in every paragraph. One or two well-placed links per guide are better than ten repetitive ones, and they read more like advice than advertising. The same principle applies in reverse: service pages should link to the guides that answer the questions buyers ask before they enquire.
Match the link to the intent
Informational guides lead to explanations and next steps. Commercial pages lead to proof, process and contact routes. Don't send every reader straight to a sales page.
How do you link between related guides?
Each article should link to a handful of closely related ones, using descriptive anchors that set expectations. A guide on sitemap errors in Search Console naturally connects to articles on robots.txt and crawling versus indexing. Those connections help readers who are chasing a problem across several topics, and they signal to search engines that your coverage is joined up.
Keep the links relevant. A random link to an unrelated article helps nobody. If you can't explain why a reader would click, don't add it.
Refresh old posts with new links
When you publish something new, revisit older relevant pages and add links to it. It's one of the quickest ways to keep a content library alive.
What reporting should you keep after the audit?
An audit that vanishes into a folder is a wasted audit. A light reporting habit shows whether the work paid off and keeps the structure healthy.
It doesn't need to be complicated.
Which metrics show progress?
Counts of orphan pages, broken internal links and redirecting internal links, tracked over time. Click depth for priority pages. The number of internal links pointing to each priority page. Impressions and clicks for those pages in Search Console. And crawl behaviour, such as how quickly new pages are discovered.
None of these is a magic number. Together they show whether the link structure is improving and whether the improvements correlate with better visibility.
| Metric | Source | Direction you want |
|---|---|---|
| Orphan pages | Crawler plus sitemap comparison | Down to near zero |
| Broken internal links | Crawler | Down to zero |
| Redirecting internal links | Crawler | Down |
| Links to priority pages | Crawler, Search Console | Up where relevant |
| Impressions for priority pages | Search Console | Up over time |
Record the baseline first
Save the numbers before you change anything, so you can compare afterwards. A dated snapshot is all you need.
How do you share the results?
Keep it short. A one-page summary listing what you found, what you changed, the before and after numbers and what's next is more useful than a long report. Share it with the people who edit content and manage the site, because they're the ones who'll keep the structure healthy.
If you'd like a specialist to run the audit and brief your team, a technical SEO consultant can crawl the site, map the link graph, write the tickets and check the results, and a wider SEO audit puts internal linking in the context of everything else holding the site back.
What if the site is very small?
A ten-page site doesn't need a spreadsheet of five hundred links. A small site audit is mostly a conversation with the navigation: can a visitor reach every service from the homepage in one or two clicks, do the pages link to each other where it makes sense and does each page have a clear next step? Read each page as a customer would and add the missing links by hand.
Even so, the same rules apply. Use real anchors, descriptive text and a link to the contact page from each service page. A tiny site with tidy links often outperforms a bigger site with a tangle, because everything it has is easy to find and clearly related, and that kind of clarity is available to every business at almost no cost.
A five-minute test for tiny sites
Pick any page and ask: could a stranger find the contact page, the main service and one related page from here without searching? If not, add a link.
Frequently asked questions
What is an internal link audit?
It's a review of how your pages link to each other: which pages receive links, which have none, how the links are built and what anchor text they use. The goal is to make sure important pages are easy for visitors and crawlers to find, and that links point to the right places with useful, descriptive text.
How many internal links should a page have?
There's no ideal number. Google's guidance says there isn't a fixed target, but that if a page seems to have too many links, it probably does. Focus on relevant links that help a reader take the next step, and make sure every important page is linked from at least one other page in context.
What is an orphan page?
A page that no other page on your site links to. Crawlers can only find it through a sitemap or an external link, and it sends a weak importance signal. Orphan pages are common after redesigns, with old campaign pages and with content published but never added to navigation or related links.
Does anchor text matter for internal links?
Yes. Google's guidance says anchor text should be descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to the pages involved, and that generic phrases such as "click here" or "read more" are poor choices. Good anchors help readers and crawlers understand what the destination page is about without stuffing keywords.
Which tools do I need for an internal link audit?
A site crawler such as Screaming Frog or Sitebulb, Google Search Console's links report, a spreadsheet and your analytics. The crawler finds the link graph and orphan candidates, Search Console shows how Google sees internal linking and the spreadsheet turns findings into a prioritised plan.