How to Audit Internal Links on Your Site

An internal link audit maps how pages on your site connect to each other. It finds orphan pages that receive no internal links, over-linked pages that dilute crawl budget, weak anchor text that wastes keyword signals, and broken internal links that waste crawl equity and damage user experience.

Most sites have internal link problems they are not aware of. A full audit takes less than an hour with a crawler.

Why internal links matter for SEO

Internal links serve two purposes: they help users navigate your site, and they distribute ranking signals between pages.

When a high-authority page links to another page on your site with relevant anchor text, it passes some of its ranking power to that destination. Pages with no internal links receive no such signal. Even if the content is excellent, Google may crawl it infrequently and rank it lower than its quality deserves.

Google also uses internal links to discover pages. If a page has no internal links pointing to it, Googlebot may never find it at all unless it appears in your XML sitemap.

Step 1: Run a full site crawl

The first step is a complete crawl of your site. You need to see every URL, every internal link, and the relationship between them. Manual review is impractical for any site over a few dozen pages.

Crawly crawls every page on your site and records all internal links found, including the source page, destination page, anchor text, and whether the destination returns a 200, redirect, or error.

Step 2: Find orphan pages

Orphan pages have no internal links pointing to them. They rely entirely on XML sitemap discovery for crawling, which means they are crawled less frequently and receive no internal link equity.

In Crawly, orphan pages are flagged in the Issues tab. You can also identify them by filtering the Pages view to show pages with zero inbound internal links.

The fix for orphan pages depends on why they are orphaned:

• If the page should be part of a content cluster, add contextual links from related pages.
• If the page is old or thin, consider whether it should exist at all.
• If the page is new and not yet linked, add it to the relevant section of your site and link from the most relevant existing pages.

Step 3: Check anchor text quality

Anchor text tells Google what a linked page is about. Generic anchors like "click here", "read more", or "learn more" waste this signal. Descriptive, keyword-relevant anchor text reinforces what the destination page covers.

Review your internal links and look for:

• Anchors that describe the action rather than the content ("click here to find out more")
• Anchors that are too generic ("article", "post", "page")
• Inconsistent anchors pointing to the same page with different text

You do not need every internal link to carry exact-match keywords. Natural variation is fine. But at least some of the internal links to your most important pages should include the terms you want those pages to rank for.

Step 4: Fix broken internal links

A broken internal link points to a URL that returns a 404 or similar error. This wastes the crawl request, damages user experience, and throws away the link equity that would have been passed.

Crawly reports broken internal links in the Issues tab. For each broken link, the fix is either to update the link to the correct URL, remove the link entirely, or restore the destination page if it was deleted accidentally.

Step 5: Identify redirect chains in internal links

When an internal link points to a URL that redirects to another URL, crawlers follow the chain. This is slightly inefficient and, in long chains, can lose some link equity. More importantly, it often indicates that internal links were not updated after a URL change.

Best practice is to update internal links to point directly to the final destination URL, bypassing redirects entirely. Crawly flags internal links that point to redirecting URLs so you can update them.

Step 6: Review link distribution

Look at which pages receive the most internal links. Typically these should be your most commercially important or highest-traffic pages. If your homepage receives hundreds of internal links but your key service or product pages receive only one or two, your link distribution does not match your priorities.

Use Crawly's Pages view to sort pages by the number of inbound internal links. Pages you want Google to prioritise should receive more internal links from relevant content.

How often to run an internal link audit

Run an internal link audit when:

• You launch new content and need to link to it from existing pages
• You restructure or migrate your site
• You delete or merge pages
• You notice key pages ranking lower than expected

For actively growing sites, a quarterly internal link audit catches problems before they compound. Crawly's crawl comparison feature lets you diff two crawls side by side to see which internal links were added, removed, or broken since the last audit.

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Internal links are one of the few SEO levers entirely within your control. An audit takes less than an hour with Crawly. Download Crawly and run your first crawl free.