Inbound internal links: The links that point to a page from other pages on the same site. Counting them is the quickest way to see which pages a site treats as important — and which it has forgotten.
Why the count matters
Inbound internal links are the one ranking signal you control completely. In Zyppy’s correlation study of 23 million internal links, pages with more inbound internal links tended to get more Google clicks, up to roughly 45–50 links, after which the relationship flattened. Correlation, not proof — but it matches what PageRank-style link analysis would predict.
The comparison that matters
A raw count is less useful than the count set against value. On most sites, inlinks follow age: the oldest posts have the most, because everything since has linked back to them. Meanwhile the page that earns the money — an outdoor-gear shop’s best-selling tent, a plumber’s emergency call-out page, a SaaS pricing page — may have three.
A quick check: export inlinks per URL from a crawl, put it next to Search Console clicks (or revenue) per page, and sort by value. Any top-20 page below the site’s median inlink count is under-linked.
Counting them on WordPress
- Rank Math’s link counter and Yoast SEO’s text link counter show incoming links per post in the posts list, counting links from post content.
- A crawler counts every link, menus included; look at “unique inlinks” so a page linked twice from one post counts once.
- Search Console’s Links report shows Google’s view, but it is a sample.
A page with zero is an orphan page. The internal links per page guide covers how many links pages should give and receive.