Links are how search engines discover your pages and decide which ones matter. Broken links, orphan pages, and weak anchor text all quietly suppress rankings. Here's what the audit checks in the Links category, and why each one counts.
The link graph — which pages link to which, with what anchor text — is one of the strongest signals search engines use to crawl, understand, and rank a site.
Every internal link does three things at once: it creates a path for crawlers to discover a page, it passes ranking authority to that page, and it acts as a vote of importance. Get the link structure right and your best pages accumulate authority and get crawled often. Get it wrong — broken targets, orphaned pages, equity leaking into redirects — and even strong content struggles to rank. The explainers below go deep on each issue.
Each one covers what the issue is, why it hurts rankings, and how to fix it.
Broken links waste crawl budget, leak link equity, create dead ends for users, and signal a neglected site. How to find and fix every internal and outbound 404.
A page with no incoming internal links is nearly invisible to search engines — hard to discover, starved of authority. How orphan pages happen and how to connect them.
Anchor text tells search engines what the linked page is about. Generic "click here" links, missing anchor text, and low diversity all waste that signal. How to link with intent.
Grounded in the real checks the crawler runs on every page.
Broken links and pages that link to broken pages · links to redirects · orphan pages with no incoming internal links · pages in the sitemap with no internal links pointing to them · pages more than four clicks deep from the homepage · indexable pages with very few incoming links · malformed link URLs Google can't crawl · links missing anchor text · low anchor-text diversity to a target · pages with more than 250 outbound links · pages where external links outnumber internal · pages with no outgoing links at all.
Free to start. Find broken links, orphan pages and equity leaks across your whole site.
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