Internal link audit: A check of how a site’s own pages link to each other: which posts nothing links to, which links are broken or bounce through redirects, how deep each post sits, and whether each topic hangs together.
Why it matters
Internal links are the part of a site’s search setup the owner controls completely. Google finds most pages by following links, and readers find their next post the same way. Sites drift: posts get renamed, menus change, new posts go live with nothing pointing at them. An audit catches that drift while it is a handful of links rather than hundreds.
What it checks
| Question | What to look for |
|---|---|
| Is every post linked? | Orphan pages that nothing in your writing links to, and posts with only one or two links in |
| Do the links work? | Broken links, redirect chains and links to noindexed pages |
| Can readers reach every post? | Click depth: posts more than three clicks from the home page |
| Does each topic hang together? | Topics with no hub, and two posts competing for one search |
Count only links inside the writing. A menu or footer links to every page at once, so a post can look linked on every page of the site while no article mentions it.
Scoring an audit
No search engine publishes a score for internal linking, so any score is the tool’s own definition, and worth exactly as much as its method is open. Silotree’s is the Silotree Score: the four questions above as one number from 0 to 100, weighted 40/20/20/20, with the whole formula published. It leaves out link text on purpose: a score that punished “click here” would teach people to stuff keywords into links. What moves each part, and the order to fix things in, is in how to raise your Silotree Score.
How to run one
- Crawl your published pages, counting links inside articles separately from menus and footers.
- Fix broken links and redirects first: they change which addresses exist.
- Then link the orphans, longest and most useful first.
- Then look at depth and topics, and run it again next month.
The free internal link audit does the crawl and the score with no account. To do it by hand, the internal link audit checklist has twenty checks in order, each with free tools.