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.
They do three jobs: help search engines discover your pages, pass ranking authority between pages, and signal which pages you consider most important by how often and prominently you link to them. A page with no internal links pointing to it is hard to discover and receives no internal authority, so it rarely ranks. The internal link graph 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 equity to pass on. When you link to a 404 or a redirect, that equity is wasted or diluted. Deliberately steering internal link equity toward the pages you most want to rank is core internal-linking SEO.
Broken links and links to broken pages, links to redirects, orphan pages with no incoming internal links, pages buried more than four clicks from the homepage, malformed link URLs Google can't crawl, links with no anchor text, low anchor-text diversity, pages with too many outbound links, and pages where external links outnumber internal ones. Each one wastes crawl budget, leaks authority, or weakens how a page is understood.
There's no fixed number, but every page worth ranking should have at least a few contextual internal links from relevant pages, and your most important pages should be linked often and prominently. The audit flags pages with very few incoming links, and pages with more than 250 outbound links (which dilute the value each one passes).
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