How to check your internal links

Apart from the broken links report, Pulno will also show you all outbound and inbound links coming to each page on your website. The reports regarding the website’s linking are divided into two sections, internal and external links.

Recommended reading: 

What are links? - essential information about linking

Link depth - on creating a website structure and link depth

Main report

During each website analysis, Pulno checks for any linking issues. The main report shows broken external and internal links. 

Depending on the plan you choose, Pulno analyzes websites in packs - beginning with 50 pages in the free plan and ending at 10,000 pages in the business plan. The analysis of internal linking gives the most reliable results when you analyze all pages on your website. It is signified in your dashboard in the “analyzed / found pages” section.

Without the complete analysis of all pages, Pulno is not able to find all links and fully analyze the internal linking.

As always, our reports will offer you the relevant information in the tooltips regarding the broken links. 

You can also use the shortcut to find the list of all issues, in the sidebar on the right.

How to check inbound links to a given page

Internal links

You can check all internal links pointing to a given page in a page report.

Following the steps presented above, you will get an analysis of all internal incoming links. The filters will let you check the response status codes, link anchors, nofollow parameter and link depth. The more important the page is, the lower should be the link depth. 

Backlinks

You can check the backlinks in the Backlinks monitoring and Backlink checker tools. To check the backlinks for a particular page you must type the page’s URL in the filter.  

External outbound links

The report concerning the outbound links is available in two places. First, you will find them in the Toolbox as “External links”.

You can also check all internal and external outbound links directly from the page level.

Linking structure visualization (linking diagram)

The linking structure, especially of the bigger websites, may prove difficult to understand. The Structure visualization tool in the Toolbox helps a lot with this task. 

The linking diagram shows the shortest paths between the homepage and the pages.

Yellow nodes (you can change the color in settings in the upper right corner of the diagram) are the pages that are working. The nodes in grey are the ones that won’t be indexed by Google. There may be various reasons for this:

• noindex meta tag
• X-Robots-Tag header
• rel=canonical pointing to a different page
• page blocked with a robots.txt file

The nodes in red mean the pages are not working.

A single click on a node will show you the shortest path to a given page.

A double click on a node will take you to a page report.

After you consolidate your account with Google Search Console, you will be able to see the data on traffic directly on a diagram (the number of keywords visible in the results, the number of impressions and clicks).

Internal link analysis with Pulno

Internal Link Structure Recommendation

1) Add links to relevant content.

In the paragraph above I linked to other articles at Pulno.com. It's good for users, it's good for search engine spiders. Find similar topics and link to them.

2) Add contextual links in articles.

Internal links in navigation menus are important. But the contextual, in-text links in articles seem to carry more weight. Schedule internal link building once in a quarter or once a year to maintain good internal link architecture.

3) Set proper anchor texts

Tell search engine crawlers what they should expect by setting descriptive anchor texts including the keyword you'd like to rank for.

4) Run internal link audit

Pulno will find broken links. Read more about the effects of broken links on your site.

5) PageRank

PageRank (link equity, link juice) flows through internal links. Search engines crawl a website by exploring links (and sitemaps, but links are more important). Make sure you link to important pages from many pages, both on-site and other domains.

6) nofollow attribute

Nofollow is a signal to Google that the link should be ignored or treated as potentially harmful. There's no need to mark internal links as nofollow. The better way to block search engines from indexing a page is by setting "noindex" or blocking a page in the robots.txt file.

Internal link report

Pulno internal link checker report is included in the whole website report as a separate spreadsheet tab. You can export only internal link issues too.

Conclusion

Internal linking structure is a crucial part of search engine optimization (SEO). Proper link depth of key pages, clear structure, and well-matched anchor texts are all very important for website optimization and better rankings. Pulno lets you analyze your internal linking in several ways, with clear visualizations included.