Few Internal Links, and the Times the Check Is Wrong

Nineteen domains raised this internal links finding and eight of them were not thin pages at all. They were bot challenges.

The count is small enough to check by hand, which is how the split was found. whitehouse.gov came back with nine words on the page and an HTTP 403. fiverr.com returned 403 as well. theduran.com answered 200 but served a nine word page titled "Checking your browser". None of those are sites with a linking problem. They are sites that declined to be crawled, and the report read the empty result as an empty page.

How to tell whether you really have few internal links

Two numbers on your report settle it. The word count and the link count come from the same crawl, so a page claiming zero internal links while also claiming several hundred words is a contradiction, and it is the real one.

If the page is under about fifty words, or the report shows a 403 or a challenge title, the crawl did not get your content. Adding internal links will not change what the next test sees.

Where the page is long and genuinely carries few internal links, the finding is correct and worth acting on. Across 98 pages we have tested with a full DOM, the median internal link count is 37 and a quarter sit below 19. So if you are in single figures with a page of real length, you are below most of the web rather than at the edge of a threshold.

Why a body link is not the same as a menu link

The check counts links in the page body. That distinction is deliberate and it is the part people push back on, because the obvious answer is that every page on a site is one click from every other page through the navigation. Two things are true at once here. A crawler does follow your navigation, so the pages are found. What the navigation does not do is say anything about which pages matter. A link in a menu appears on every page and points at everything, so it distributes attention evenly and tells a search engine nothing about relationships.

A body link is a statement. This paragraph is about topic X, and here is the page that covers X in more depth. That is information a menu cannot carry, and it is the part the count is counting.

Finding the pages that actually need one

The place to start is the pages nothing links to, not the pages with fewest links. Those are different problems and the second is often fine.

Our internal link visualiser crawls up to 35 pages from your homepage and draws the link graph, which answers three questions a list of URLs cannot. It names the orphan pages, meaning a page with no link from the body of any other page, reachable only through your sitemap and only by a crawler that reads it. It reports how many clicks each page sits from the homepage, so you can see whether anything important is buried. And it separates navigation links from body links, which is what makes the first two answers mean anything.

An orphan page is the case worth fixing first. It is not that it ranks badly. It receives nothing from the rest of the site, and a reader cannot arrive at it by browsing.

What a good internal link looks like

Anchor text describes the destination. "Click here" and "read more" tell a crawler nothing, and they tell a screen reader user less, because a screen reader can list the links on a page with no surrounding text. The guide on alt text covers the same principle for images.

The link belongs in the sentence that needs it. A paragraph explaining what happens when a certificate expires should link to the page about expiring certificates at the point where the reader would want it. Pulling those links into a block at the end of the article is a common pattern and it is worse than useless, because a list of related links is not a statement about anything.

Depth is the thing to work on rather than volume. A page three clicks from your homepage is weaker than the same page one click away, and adding a fourth link to a page that already has thirty does less than linking to the one that has none. The visualiser sorts its report by depth for that reason.

If your site is on WordPress, most SEO plugins will list the pages with no inbound internal links. Use that alongside the visualiser, because the plugin sees your whole site and the visualiser sees what a crawler sees from the outside. Where the two disagree, the crawler is describing what actually happened.