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 and with what anchor text, is one of the strongest signals search engines use to crawl, understand, and rank a site.
Search engines were built on links. The original breakthrough behind Google, PageRank, was the idea that a link is a vote: a page linked to by many strong pages is probably important. That principle still runs underneath modern ranking, and it applies just as much to your internal links as to backlinks from other sites. Every link inside your own site is a vote you control.
Each internal link does three jobs at once. It creates a path for crawlers to discover a page. It passes ranking authority (often called link equity or PageRank) to that page. And it acts as a vote of importance, telling search engines which pages you consider central based on how often and how prominently you link to them. Get the link structure right and your best pages accumulate authority and get crawled often. Get it wrong, with broken targets, orphaned pages, or equity leaking into redirects, and even excellent content struggles to rank.
Three things move through your link graph. When a link breaks or a page is orphaned, one of these flows is cut off.
Crawlers find pages by following links. A page with no internal links pointing to it can only be found via the sitemap, if at all, and is crawled rarely. New content that nothing links to can sit unindexed for weeks.
Ranking strength flows along links. A page linked from your strong, well-linked pages inherits some of that strength. Link to a 404 or a redirect and that authority drains into a dead end instead of reaching a real page.
Anchor text and link context describe the destination. Descriptive anchors tell search engines what a page is about; generic "click here" links pass no topical signal at all, wasting the vote.
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.
Each one is a real check the crawler runs on every page.
Internal links do three jobs at once. They help search engines discover your pages, they pass ranking authority from one page to another, and they signal which pages you consider most important through how often and how prominently you link to them.
The consequence is that a page with no internal links pointing to it is both hard to discover and starved of internal authority, so it rarely ranks whatever its content is worth. Because the whole graph is under your own control, unlike backlinks, the internal link structure is one of the most underused levers in technical SEO.
Link equity, also called PageRank or link juice, is the ranking authority that flows through a link from one page to another. Pages with more and stronger incoming links have more of it to pass on, so a link from a well-linked page is worth more than a link from a neglected one.
That equity can also be wasted. When you link to a 404 it drains into a dead end, and when you link to a redirect it is diluted by the extra hop. Deliberately steering internal link equity toward the pages you most want to rank, and away from dead ends, is the core of internal-linking SEO.
A crawl finds broken links and pages that link to broken pages, links pointing at redirects rather than the final URL, orphan pages with no incoming internal links, and pages buried more than four clicks from the homepage. It also catches malformed link URLs that Google cannot crawl.
On the anchor side it flags links with no anchor text and low anchor-text diversity, and on the volume side it flags pages with too many outbound links and pages where external links outnumber internal ones. Each of these either wastes crawl budget, leaks authority, or weakens how a page is understood, which is why they are worth fixing together rather than one at a time.
There is no fixed number to hit. The useful floor is that every page worth ranking should have at least a few contextual internal links from relevant pages, and the pages you care about most should be linked often and prominently rather than mentioned once in a footer.
There is a ceiling too. The audit flags pages with very few incoming links, and separately flags pages carrying more than 250 outbound links, since a large number of links on one page dilutes the value each individual link passes.
Free to start. Find broken links, orphan pages and equity leaks across your whole site.
Start my free audit