How healthy is your internal linking?

How the score works

Each question is worth a share of 100. Your answer earns all of it, two thirds, a third or none. The weights are our judgement, set by two things: how strong the evidence for the habit is, and how much it usually costs a site. Habits Google documents — linking every page you care about, descriptive link text, working links¹² — weigh the most. Habits that are good practice without a published source weigh less, and say so.

What the bands mean

• Strong (85+): Your linking habits are sound. A crawl will confirm it — or find the few posts that slipped through.
• Good, with gaps (65+): The basics are there. A handful of habits are costing you readers on posts you already wrote.
• Patchy (40+): Some posts are well connected and many probably aren't. This is the most common result, and the most fixable.
• Needs attention (0+): Internal linking hasn't had much of your time yet — which means the easiest wins are still on the table.

What it can and can’t tell you

The score measures habits you report, not your site. That matters most for the first question: on a typical theme every post is in a menu or an archive, so it looks linked — while no article links to it. Google’s rule is about pages being linked from other pages,¹ and a crawl that counts only links in your writing is the honest way to check.

Nothing you answer is stored. Your answers are written into the result’s address, so a shared result shows the same score to whoever opens it.

What to do next

Verify the score with the free link checker, which reads your site and finds every post nothing links to, or start with the orphan page finder if that was your weakest answer. The internal link audit checklist turns each question into steps, and the internal linking strategy guide covers hubs and topics. Silotree keeps the habits on track with a few suggested links a week.

Sources

Each one is labelled with how much weight it can bear. Where the evidence is thin, the page says so.

1. Google documentation Google Search Central — Link best practices for Google (updated Dec 2025). Every page you care about should be linked from at least one other page; there is no ideal number of links; anchor text should be descriptive, concise and not stuffed with keywords.
2. Google documentation Google Search Central — How HTTP status codes and network errors affect Google Search. Googlebot follows a limited number of redirect hops, and pages answering 4xx are dropped from the index.
3. Google documentation Google Search Central — SEO Starter Guide (updated Dec 2025). Google finds most new pages through links; link text should tell people and Google what the linked page is about.
4. Google, said publicly Search Engine Journal — Google: click depth matters more than URL structure (Jun 2018). John Mueller: what matters is how many clicks a page is from the home page, not slashes in its address; pages closer to the home page are treated as more important.
5. Google, said publicly Search Engine Journal — Google cautions against using too many internal links (Jul 2021). John Mueller: linking everything to everything blurs a site's structure; a clear hierarchy plus contextual links to related pages works better.
6. Google, said publicly Search Engine Journal — Google answers SEO question about keyword cannibalization (Sep 2025). John Mueller: several of your pages showing for one search is not a problem in itself; look at what Search Console shows, and prefer one strong page over needless duplicates.