Internal Link Audit
Audit the internal links on a whole site: what connects to what, which pages nothing links to, and which links are worth adding next.
What an internal link audit covers
An internal link audit is a count of what actually connects your pages. It starts from the sitemap, reads the pages the sitemap lists, and builds a graph in which every page is a node and every internal link is an edge. From that graph come the numbers worth having: the pages with no incoming internal links, the pages whose only links are template links, the click depth of each page from the home page, and the link counts between your top level sections.
This is an audit of structure, not of wording. It does not grade your copy and it does not tell you a page is bad. It tells you where links are missing, which is the part of an audit you can act on the same afternoon.
How the audit runs
Five steps from a sitemap to a file you can work through:
- Verify the site, so the crawler only ever reads a site you administer.
- Crawl it from the sitemap, one page at a time, obeying robots.txt and waiting between requests to the same host.
- Split every link into contextual or template by reading the page's main content rather than the whole document, so navigation and footer links do not count as article links.
- Rank the missing contextual links: source page, target page, anchor text, the sentence the anchor sits in, a similarity score and the matched terms.
- Export the orphans, the depth figures, the silo matrix and the suggestions as CSV.
Contextual links and template links
The split is the finding. A contextual link sits inside the article content, among sentences about the same subject, and it tells a search engine that two pages belong together. A template link sits in the navigation, the header or the footer, appears on every page, and says nothing about what this page is about.
That is how a page ends up reachable and still invisible: it is in the sitemap, a visitor can click through from the menu, and no article ever mentions it. The audit reports both halves, the pages with no links at all and the pages with nothing but furniture, because fixing the first and ignoring the second leaves most of the problem in place.
What the report gives you
The orphan list, the contextual orphan list, the click depth of every page, the silo matrix, and a ranked list of internal links to add with the anchor text and the source sentence already chosen. Beside each suggestion sits the score and the terms the two pages share, so you can read the reason before you accept the link.
Every suggestion can be refused. You decide which pairs are really about the same thing, and the CSV is yours whether or not you keep the account.
What the audit will not do
The crawl reads the static HTML your server sends, the same HTML a search engine reads on a normal visit, and it does not run JavaScript. If your site builds its links in the browser, those links are not in that HTML and no crawl can see them. We say that plainly rather than let a link count imply otherwise, and the same limit covers anything behind a login, a cookie wall or bot protection: a page that will not serve to a stranger is named in the report as a failed page instead of being read as an empty one.
Nothing is fetched until the site is proved to be yours, one of three ways: a meta tag in the page head, a small file at a known path, or a DNS TXT record. Until one of those is found, the only request made to the host is the verification check itself.
This version audits the links between your own pages. It does not check the status of links that leave your site, and it does not replace your analytics: an audit says how your pages are connected, not how many people read them.
This tool never touches your site. It does not insert links, does not inject JavaScript, and does not ask for your CMS password. The report is an export: a plain CSV with the orphan lists and, for every suggestion, the source page, the target page, the anchor text and the sentence, ready to work through in whatever runs your site.
Free gives you one verified site, crawls of up to 500 pages, 3 crawls a month, both orphan lists, the silo matrix, the first 50 suggestions and the CSV export. Pro at $12 a month raises the crawl to 5,000 pages, 30 crawls a month and every suggestion it finds. Agency at $29 a month crawls 20,000 pages a time, 100 crawls a month across 15 sites.
Sign up free and audit one site. The orphan lists, the depth figures and the silo matrix are all in the free plan, and no card is needed.
Internal link audit questions
Do I need to install anything on my site?
No. The crawl comes from outside, so there is no plugin, no app to install and no CMS access to grant. If the site serves HTML and has a sitemap, it can be audited. If the sitemap lists nothing readable, the crawl stops and tells you that instead of showing an empty report.
How is this different from the free single-page check?
The free checker reads one page and counts the links on it, split into contextual and template. The audit reads the whole site from the sitemap and answers the questions a single page cannot: which pages nothing links to, how deep each page sits, and which pairs of pages are missing a link that the text already supports.
Does the audit tell me exactly where to put each link?
It gives you the pair, the anchor text and the sentence on the source page that the anchor already appears in, so you are placing a phrase the page has already written rather than inventing one. Whether that sentence is really about the same thing is a judgement about your own content, and the audit leaves it to you on purpose.